January 29, 2012

Mass Aggregators

"The patent world is quietly
undergoing a change of seismic
proportions. In a few short years, a handful of entities have amassed
vast treasuries of patents on an unprecedented scale... Mass
aggregators do not engage in the manufacturing of products, nor do they
conduct much research." As capitalism acts as a virluent weed of greed,
the patent world has become infested with investment in invention, with
the sole purpose of extortion. A new paper by Tom Ewing & Robin
Feldman: "The
Giants Among Us," details the shadowy domains of patent aggregators.

January 19, 2012

A Kodak Moment

By failing to keep up with the
times, Eastman Kodak drove itself into the ground, declaring
bankruptcy. By stark contrast, competitor FujiFilm has done quite
well for itself, including making wonderful digital cameras. Kodak's
death rattle turned into a whine: "Kodak Chief Financial Officer
Antoinette McCorvey said Apple, RIM and HTC Corp. took advantage of
Kodak's weakened financial condition to drag out litigation over
alleged violations of the company's intellectual property." Take a
picture of this - a decent patent portfolio is no salvation from
clueless management, with which the world is brimming, in every sector
of commerce and government. The exceptions prove the rule. Kodak was no
exception. Those same companies that held Kodak off patent licensing at
arm's length will be the ones ponying up to buy Kodak's patent
portfolio on the cheap in a bankruptcy auction, to use to bludgeon
competitors like a money pinata, just as Kodak tried to.

January 1, 2012

Hostage

The Wall
Street Journal reports that mobile phone patent cases before
the ITC "hold the economy hostage," because the ITC's sole power is "to
ban imports of foreign products that infringe on U.S. patents." The ITC
was granted this power in the notorious (for its economical
insensibility) 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the passage of which
rightly sent the stock market into a nose dive. More generally, in this
age of rapid technological advancement, patents, regardless of
technology, impose an unjustified tax on consumers and smaller
companies, demolishing competition and snuffing start-up prospects. The
ITC has a built-in bias against foreign-based corporations. The corrupt
courts, including (especially) the CAFC & Supreme Court, find
ways to let the largest corporations prevail (in all cases except where
the corruption would be most egregiously apparent, in which case the
toll to the infringing corporation is lowered). This costly crooked
game needs to be abolished.

November 14, 2011

Collision

The
Wall Street Journal scores some points with "When
Patent, Antitrust Worlds Collide." "Antitrust law frowns on
monopolies. Patent law grants them to inventors." The courts have built
in Janus-like bias, so as to be able to rule as they like, almost
always in favor of plutocracy. "Intellectual-property rights do not
confer a privilege to violate the antitrust laws," one court wrote in a
1999 opinion. "But it is also correct that the antitrust laws do not
negate the patentee's right to exclude others from patent property."
Getting to the bottom line - "The patent system is very seriously
screwed up," says Ed Black,
president of the Computer & Communications Industry
Association, an
industry lobbying group. "It's being misused and gamed by a variety of
players in a variety of ways." The focus of the article is on the
handheld mobile device market. The upshot is that patents do nothing to
foster innovation, but much to limit competition, and cost consumers,
as well as innovative companies, while entrenching the powers that be.

November 8, 2011

Whiney But Right

Cowed
by antitrust
proceedings from the 1990s, Microsoft was long afraid to assert its
patent portfolio. But as the corporate bulb grows dim, lacking
innovative products, stodgy Microsoft has awoken to patent extortion.
This past summer, Barnes & Noble Inc. lobbied
the Justice Department to open an antitrust probe of Microsoft over
patent assertions, which are perfectly legal. While Google's Android OS
has been running
amok, B&N accused Microsoft of trying to kill off handheld
devices, such as B&N's Nook e-reader, with a barrage of
"frivolous" patent suits. "Microsoft's exorbitant licenses for its
patents entrench the dominant players in the relevant markets because
those players can afford to take a license, while small players cannot,"
B&N wrote to the Justice Department's antitrust chief. Numerous
corporate giants in the computing & mobile device industry,
including Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and Google, are in patent brawls
over the mobile market. While Microsoft's patent moves are nothing more
than business-as-usual, B&N is on-point about patents hindering
innovation, and
being the last refuge for declining and dying corporate has-beens,
whatever their size.

October 10, 2011

Striving But Jiving

The
book "Great
Patents" by David Orange is far from great, and it was not written by
Orange, who only penned the introduction, and otherwise claims editorship. The
subtitle to this slender volume is "advanced strategies for innovative growth
companies," but there's nothing in the book that is advanced, or particularly
strategic, other than the implicit message of "get a lawyer," as the book
breezes through topics that are either mind-numbing or an academic point of view that
has only passing semblance to reality. The book wanders between blurb dross and
boring detail, in disconnected chapters on diverse subject matter. The highest
compliment that may be paid to this hodgepodge is that the Times Roman font used is
at a point size that makes the text easy to read. At $75 in paperback, $90
hardcover, this book is nothing less than a shameless attempt at theft.

August 19, 2011

The Scoop

The
Wall Street Journal has an investment tip: "for
bargain stocks, check the patent office... Big patent portfolios are
increasingly being used as financial weapons... Patent-stuffed companies might
be richer than they look." The problem, according to WSJ and an Ocean Tomo
poobah: "valuing just one patent can take weeks and cost tens of thousands of
dollars." That's because Ocean Tomo is not very adept at the sport of kings.

August 15, 2011

Arming

As
a relative newcomer, Google has been light in its quiver of patent arrows. Its
bid to buy the 6,000-strong Nortel patent horde was
crushed
by a consortium. Google has decided to arm itself by acquisition of Motorola
Mobility for $12.5 billion, the rump leftover of a once-promising technology
company. The phone business itself means much less to Google than the 17,000
patents that would pad its own thin portfolio, as counterpunch protection for
its own Android mobile operating system, being assailed for patent
infringement by competitors.

July 1, 2011

The Sport of Kings

An
unlabeled consortium including Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Research in Motion,
Ericsson, and EMC bought the treasure trove of Nortel patents at auction
yesterday for $4.5 billion. Google opened with a $900 million bid. Nortel filed
for bankruptcy in 2009. It had a patent portfolio of about 6,000 patents and
applications. All the other Nortel assets combined sold for $3 billion. Google
squeezed ironic sour grapes from the auction: "This outcome is disappointing for
anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity
and competition." However true the observation, no corporation, Google or
otherwise, practices "open innovation." Not to mention that beliefs have no
appraisal value.

June 5, 2011

Scrutiny

In
an exercise of antitrust navel-gazing, the Justice Department is probing the
sale of bankrupt Nortel's 6,000+ patent trove. Google made an eye-watering $900
million opening bid. Apple might want to bite, and Blackberry might phone a bid
in. The ostensible concern is that the successful bidder may sue unsuccessful
bidders, and every company that crawls into the commercial space of wireless
anything, for patent infringement. Say it ain't so.

May 3, 2011

Changing the Channel

Cornered
for patent infringement, Echostar dropped dime. Big-time dime: $500 million.
TiVo settled its suit against EchoStar/Dish Network for a $300 million gratuity
now, with another $200 million payable on an installment plan. EchoStar sighed
that it was "pleased to put this litigation behind us." TiVo CEO Tom Rogers was
ingracious and narcissistic: "The compensation from this settlement, including
the resulting reduction in legal expenditures, puts TiVo in an enviable
financial and strategic position." But what do you expect from someone in the
boob-tube business.

April 4, 2011

Unprecedented Opportunity

While
Nortel Networks ran its business into the ground, it amassed, and litigated, a
formidable, if cracked, patent portfolio - around 6,000 U.S. patents and apps,
covering networking, wireless, and Internet technologies. (Patent
Hawk invalidated several patents Nortel asserted in years past, hence the
"cracked" comment.) But corporations are always about numbers, not quality, so
Google has put up a big number to buy the Nortel patent portfolio: $900 million.
The portfolio is being auctioned off as part of Nortel's bankruptcy
proceedings. Other companies will bid, but Google's opening is eye watering.
Google, or some billion-dollar bidder, will use Nortel's portfolio for leverage
in patent suits from competitors, and licensing muscle.

March 21, 2011

Sweeping

Google:
"Sweeping software patent claims... threaten innovation." Sounds trollish. Very
trollish. But Google was speaking of Microsoft, in reference to its suit against
Barnes & Noble over its Nook e-book, which uses the Google Android OS. Corporate
chimps will pant-hoot at the damndest things.

March 7, 2011

Drugged

The
drug industry has long counted on American public trends to the tune of hundreds
of billions of dollars each year. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, and
diabetes are the diseases of junk food and meat eaters who lack the discipline
to lead a healthy existence. Americans splash out richly on state-of-the-art
medications to treat their life-endangering lifestyles. The patented blockbuster
drugs that treat the symptoms of ignorance are going off-patent, and it's
tipping a tizzy, according to the
New York Times.

February 3, 2011

Head In

The
patent system hypothetically performs a public notice function, publishing
inventions. For drugs, the FDA consolidates patent information into the
Orange Book.
Meanwhile, computer technology companies spend billions of dollars a year in
their own R&D, completely ignoring what's already been done. As a matter of
corporate policy, Microsoft and Intel are exemplary - never bothering to look at
existing innovation before committing hundreds of millions in research to
reinvent. The patent system doesn't work for corporations because corporations
don't work the patent system.

January 11, 2011

Outhouse

David
Leonhart at the New York Times can't tell a copycat from a thieving rat, calling
software piracy "intellectual property theft." "For the United States, the No. 1
problem with China's economy is probably intellectual property theft. Technology
companies, for example, continue to notice Chinese government agencies
downloading software updates for programs they have never bought, at least not
legally." The U.S. fourth estate has become an outhouse. Not to mention
so-called "technology companies" that are nothing more than whiny witnesses to
shoplifting. Are the companies afraid that alienating the powers-that-be in the
middle kingdom would bring a badass backlash? There's the story that Mr. Leonhart
missed.

December 11, 2010

Quiet Broken

For
a decade, Intellectual
Ventures has been amassing a fortune in patents, both by purchase and by
invention. IV has been quietly licensing. The silence was broken Wednesday, when
nine security-software companies who refused quiet negotiations were slapped out
loud with a lawsuit.

November 1, 2010

Go Ahead, Make My Day

Patent
Hawk's bread-and-butter business is invalidating patents. The smart-phone
patent slugfest among Microsoft, Motorola, Apple, Nokia, Google, HTC, Kodak, RIM
and others puts the party hat on Patent Hawk. It also puts the dunce cap on the
short-sighted heads of those companies who think that patent wars are good for
business. Somebody is bound to get hurt. While patent litigators win fat fees, companies have risked much more than market share - the prospect of billion dollar payouts, and patent war without end, especially for the desperate, is quite real. The airplane patent
wars at the beginning of the 20th century, with the Wright brothers in the thick
of it, were grounded only by the first world war.

September 5, 2010

Troll?

Paul
Allen made his bundle off Microsoft as a co-founder. He then spent decades
frittering money on creating tech companies that yielded little but patents.
That is no small success. As any entrepreneur (or venture capitalist) can tell
you, commercialization of new technology is a gauntlet which few survive to
tell the tale of payoff. Now Mr. Allen has decided to assert a few of those
patents his investments earned. The Economist characterized the assertion: "It
targets everyone who is anyone in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple, eBay,
Yahoo! and Facebook. (But not Microsoft.)" So far, no news. What is news is the
poison attitude in the mainstream press, most notably The Economist and The Wall
Street Journal, mouthpieces of corporate capitalism, but not free enterprise.

May 10, 2010

Prosecutor Grift

We
see it all the time. Inventors who paid tens of thousands of dollars to
respectable law firms who took their money and either got them worthless
patents, or strung them out with useless applications that even the patent
office wouldn't grant. They come to
Platinum Patents with a prosecution mess, or tantalized by infringement of
their invalid patent, knock on Patent
Hawk's door looking for a hookup to contingency. Too late for us to prevent
grief and loss. Prosecutors who don't work the beat on the enforcement side of
the street know but a fraction of what they need to know. That's most
prosecutors. They jostle with the crowd who don't even bother performing
adequate prior art searches, and draft claims that defy comprehension.
Dime-store prosecutors on the grift are a dime a dozen. It still saddens me to
witness every time.

May 5, 2010

Stapled

Don't
mess with Staples. "Staples has won three suits in recent months that, taken as
a whole, demonstrate its resolve to aggressively defend against patent
infringement claims it believes are without merit. The suits involved three
popular products sold under the Staples brand name. In each case, rather than
settle the litigation, Staples instead challenged claims that these products
infringed patents and won."

April 6, 2010

Open Wallet

Florian
Mueller
reports that IBM "breaks the taboo and betrays its promise" to the
open-source software community.
Allegedly, IBM threatened to sue TurboHercules, an open-source
mainframe emulator company, for patent infringement. Naive to a fault,
TurboHercules founder Roger Bowler opined: "I can state with confidence that our
emulator is in no way an enemy of IBM's." Apparently, Roger fails to reckon with
the market reality that IBM values its sales in this sector. IBM
reportedly makes around $25 billion annually on mainframe software sales.

January 14, 2010

Bull Run

For
the 17th year running, IBM has gotten the most U.S. patents. "Their patent
department is a profit center," observed Bruce Lehman, former PTO director, and
now head agent provocateur at the
International Intellectual Property Institute. IBM made something in the
neighborhood of $1.1 billion from patent licensing in 2009. But patent maven
Ocean Tomo holds that Microsoft's patent portfolio is three-fold more valuable
than IBM's. "The ultimate value is not some rating," toots Manny Schecter, IBM's
chief patent counsel. "It's the leverage we are able to get from the patent
[licensing] negotiations." Right there is the rub about Microsoft and patents:
they don't know how to monetize patents, nor even valuate them.

November 23, 2009

#1

Quantity
over quality is expressed in the quintessential American hanker of wanting to
know who's number 1, which is the surmised measure of who is best. If there ever
was a justifiable bifurcation between quantity and quality, it lies with
patents. Year after year, IBM gets the most U.S. patents. What does that really
mean?

November 14, 2009

All Red Hat and No Cattle

The
open source software crowd have had their knickers in a twist for some time
about patented processes via software, being fervently against them, and having more generally quaint
notions about intellectual property, including copyright. Patrick Anderson
provides an incisive analysis of this week's tempest in a teapot in his blog
entry:
"Free" Sells, But Who's Buying?

November 12, 2009

Rotten at the Core

The
nature of human organizations is for their collective morality to sink to the
lowest common denominator. Which is low, to the level of greed unbridled. After
all, corruption is human nature. Intel is trying to get the antitrust monkey off
its back by paying off rival AMD $1.25 billion. This is the same Intel that has
furiously and ferociously lobbied for patent deform legislation that will get
inventors' patent monkey off its back, by diluting patent protection in this
country.

November 10, 2009

Sharpened

Samsung
has been stung by Sharp at the ITC over flat-panel LCD display patents. One of
the Sharp patents in the case went to LCD brightness and refresh rate, and
another to minimizing flickering. Samsung has brushed aside speculation
about the ruling's impact, stating that it won't affect the
company's ability meet market demand. The
Financial Times opined: "unable to compete on price, rivals are trying to
compete on patents."

July 11, 2009

Almost Enough

This
weblog started to promote my patent services practice. Anyone who has read my
blogging for any period knows that many of my entries are hell and gone from
that. The left turn was conscious and, given my character, inevitable. Digging
into the patent scene was no different than my reaction to the practices of
people exercising presumed power in any form, given the endless capacity for
exploitation and rationalization of it. Even so, for someone so outspoken, the
blog has been for me as much an exercise in biting my tongue.

July 9, 2009

Uppity

Capitalism
is premised upon exploitation. Without that, no profit, and shareholders would
be shit holders. In that spirit, slavery has been the law of the land for
centuries. Not to mention the tax code. Even today, thanks to a little coercion
called an employment contract, the inventions of workers belong to their
paymasters. IPAdvocate.org is
downright uppity about that, seeking equitable distribution of patent profits
gleaned by universities for the employed researchers from whence creative
inventions sprang.

July 2, 2009

Cut to Commercial

In
years past, big-screen TV buyers gravitated to plasma displays, as LCDs were
prohibitively expense for 50+ inch screens. But as LCD screen technology has
advanced, plasma sales have receded. In 2008, four million plasma screens were
sold in North America, while 30 million LCD TVs found homes. That gap is
widening. And so
the price of plasma displays is dropping. With market realities in mind,
Japan's Hitachi and Korea's LG Electronics have settled their plasma patent
dispute with a
cross-license.

July 1, 2009

Fully Fueled

The
hyperactive Obama administration wants efficient cars, hoping to implement fleet
fuel economy imperatives that politically ran out of gas forty years ago. The
hope for fuel-efficiency lies with hybrids, which cruise on electric power and
hit the gas when a driver hits the accelerator. One company has the real
impetus: Toyota, which has around 2,100 patents for hybrid vehicles. Number two,
Honda, has about half as many hybrid patents in its portfolio. Nissan, relatively
hybrid patentless, is puttering with electric cars.

June 21, 2009

Innovation Limited

In
post-war Japan, W.
Edwards Deming taught the natives quality control methods, with which the
Japanese dazzled the industrialized world. Deming said, "expect what you
inspect." That's why companies don't innovate: the same patterns of
communication and problem-solving in the same narrow niches leading down the
same old roads, seldom blazing new trails. And the not-invented-here syndrome
often runs strong. But not always.

June 16, 2009

Off the Block

Two-bit
patent auctioneer Ocean Tomo has been snapped up by British ICAP, the world's
largest interdealer broker, for $5 million cash and a hypothetical $5 million in
shares. More precisely: "Application will be made for the listing of 692,226
ordinary shares of 10 pence each which have been conditionally allotted as
satisfaction for the stock consideration." Nine Ocean Tomo employees went along
for the ride. After a flashy start, Ocean Tomo had a hard go of it, the
recession sobering those who in flusher times might have splashed out for beachfront
abstract property.

June 11, 2009

Top Dogs

The most valuable patents are
naturally the ones covering the most profitable technologies. It would be a
facile conclusion that the most
valuable patents might also be the most litigated. Take patented drugs as an
example. Because only drug companies
provoke litigation over drug patents, the number of litigations for such are low.
Yet blockbuster patented drugs are worth hundreds of billions in sales, above
and beyond what generics later prove to be. So, while the
stakes over drug patents are quite high, the number of litigations for any
single drug patent is quite low. But take a look at the roster of litigations
filed over time, and see that a plurality involve drugs or biotechnology. So,
with drugs, lots of litigations, owing to the value of patents generally, but no
particular patent family is multiplicatively litigated.

June 9, 2009

Woe

"During
the past decade, innovation has stumbled. And that may help explain America's
economic woes." So opines faux economist at
Business Weak, Michael Mandel. Lacking a "government-constructed "innovation
index" that would allow us to conclude unambiguously that we've been
experiencing an innovation shortfall," Mandel points to the epitome of
irrational exuberance, the stock market. "If an innovation boom were truly
happening, it would likely push up stock prices for companies in such
leading-edge sectors as pharmaceuticals and information technology." Facile to a
fault, Mandel confuses innovation with the house of cards built upon an
unsustainable premise: that business cycles have been banished, and growth is
forever.

May 29, 2009

Scam Artists

Class
act Alysha Schertz (pictured) at the
BizTimes Milwaukee brings the locals up to snuff on the patented skanky in "Patent
trolls try to rip off high tech firms." "Scam artist patent trolls can
create major headaches for some companies."

May 27, 2009

Friends Again

SanDisk
and Samsung have renewed their patent cross license for another seven years.
Plus, Samsung will provide SanDisk with a guaranteed slice of its flash memory
output. Punters applauded SanDisk in particular, with shares flashing 15%.

May 23, 2009

Bracing

A
patent license agreement is only as tight as its drafting. CoreBrace owns
7,188,452, claiming a brace used in making earthquake-resistant steel-framed
buildings. Star Seismic took a non-exclusive license to '452 from the inventor,
granting Star the right to "make, use, and sell" licensed products. No mention
was made of a right to have a licensed product made by a third party. Star
having a third party manufacture its licensed products sparked a dispute.

May 21, 2009

Chipper

Overturning
an administrative law judge's mistake, the ITC found Tessera patents infringed
by six rivals: ATI Technologies, Freescale Semiconductor, Motorola, Qualcomm and
Spansion (STMicroelectronics NV). Tessera prompted the action in 2007. The ITC
issued a limited exclusion order, prohibiting the importation of semiconductor
chips that infringe several Tessera patents, and further issued cease-and-desist
orders to Motorola, Qualcomm, Freescale and Spansion. Motorola mused that it may
exercise an option agreement with Tessera to take a patent license. Tessera
shares soared 17.7% as punters exercised a little irrational exuberance.

May 17, 2009

Outlier

The
cabal misnamed as the Coalition for
Patent Fairness advocates making patent enforcement more tortuous and
expensive than it already is, as well as circumscribing patent holders' basic
rights, such as transfer of ownership. IT shakers Microsoft, Intel,
Hewlett-Packard, Micron and Cisco belong, and all share the distinction of being
top ten patent gatherers in 2008. IBM, the top patent scooper, is the only one
among IT corporate brethren who is not a member of the Coalition, and the only
one which has raked in serious lucre for years through patent licensing.
Microsoft, to its credit, has recently acquired the knack of cross-licensing.

May 12, 2009

Entitled?

Genetic
manipulation is an expensive research endeavor because it is fraught with
unpredictability. That makes it patentable. One ultimate goal of genetic
research is treating diseases. Especially when an invention offers the prospect
of a cure, the affected diseased, most desirous of the fruits, want the
benefits without paying for the toils of the innovation behind it. Case in
point: a lawsuit, spearheaded by a woman with breast cancer, supported by the
ACLU,
against genetic research pioneer Myriad
Genetics, which has patents on genes related to breast and ovarian cancers,
and against the USPTO, for allowing such patents in the first place.

May 11, 2009

Quality

IBM's
David Kappos, touted as a possible USPTO Director, testified in March before the
Senate Judiciary Committee: "We believe the quality of patents issued in the
U.S. has diminished, and that the substantial improvements needed to address
this quality crisis are not possible without Congressional action." IBM appears
to be doing its part in reducing patent quality. Its
2009/0119,148 application for "enhancing productivity" claims "1. A method
including: defining, by a user, a time template including a plurality of
predefined time intervals for scheduling meetings; and applying the time
template across a collaborative system." In a nutshell: shorter hours to
facilitate shorter meetings.

May 10, 2009

Bully

The
rabid FTC aside and amok, the U.S. Justice Department has had little stomach to
enforce antitrust violations. The Americans let Microsoft off the antitrust hook
with a smirk, while the Europeans fined them $1.16 billion. Now Intel, its
corporate culture an apparent breeding ground for bully bullshitters, as
evidenced by
recent top brass opinions regarding "patent fairness," face their own
European antitrust swat. The European Commission, which is the executive arm of
the European Union, will announce Wednesday its fine for Intel's antitrust
shenanigans. One thing these little men don't do well is learn social graces.

May 7, 2009

Monster

In
a debate on patent reform at the Commonwealth Club of California yesterday,
Intel's Chief Patent Counsel
David Simon told the audience that jury verdicts can't be overturned unless
the decision was "monstrous." It takes one to know one.

Kindled

Amazon's
new
Kindle DX, with bigger screen, comes patented:
D591,741. With exceptions, design patents for electronic devices are
relatively weak tea compared to the utility variety, and the Kindle is notably
stodgy, so it's mostly a vanity patent. Amazon appears not to have any ebook
utility patents. What they do have is the best ebook reader on the market, in a
market where momentum counts.

May 4, 2009

Feeling Taxed

The
same companies that crusade to evade paying any "patent tax" to inventors are
now crusading to evade corporate income tax. On Monday, President Obama outlined
proposals for cracking down on overseas tax havens, and eliminating tax breaks
for U.S. corporations that do business overseas. Computer tech companies soiled
their diapers in protest. "This is a $60 billion hit on American employers that
their foreign competitors won't feel," wailed the Silicon Valley Leadership
Group, representing such esteemed companies as HP, Cisco, and Oracle. Duh.

May 3, 2009

All Hat, No Cattle

200
years ago this week, Ms. Mary Dixon Kies became the first American woman granted
a patent. Ms. Kies invented a way to weave silk with straw. She aspired to apply
her invention in the booming hat industry. But her patent never made her any
money.

Shameless

Former
Intel honcho Andy Grove, now 72, but still sucking corporate teat, had a very
public senior moment over patents: "Patents themselves have become products.
They're instruments of investment traded on a separate market, often by
speculators motivated by the highest financial return on their investment." "You
should not grant a monopoly to people who don't produce."

April 30, 2009

On the Make

Apple
is trend setting again: following the model of Qualcomm, and more recently, AMD,
into design house and patent provocateur, leaving the nasty risk of
manufacturing to cost-conscious Asians. Apple has been hiring semiconductor
engineers for many moons, building a cadre for designing next-generation chips.
No fabrication intended. The only hard-shell cover for innovation is patent
protection.

April 27, 2009

Seeking Reversal

"A
patent by its very nature is anticompetitive." So
the CAFC
remarked last October in allowing reverse payment by Bayer to generic drug
makers, so that Bayer could keep its patented monopoly over antibacterial Cipro®
for a bit longer. Stanford law professor
Mark Lemley has
penned
a petition to the Supreme Court, to lay the burden of overturning reverse
payments before the august body, this nation's numero uno woolly bully. Lemley
thinks the CAFC ruling "contains fundamental errors of economic reasoning and
would shield many anti-competitive agreements from the reach of antitrust law,
causing great harm to competition."

Squall Calmed

Skipping
church to tithe in another way, on Sunday, Qualcomm agreed to pay Broadcom $891
million to settle their patent dispute. $200 million passes hands next quarter.
Its kitty bulging, the
Wall Street
Journal thinks Broadcom "primed to start executing on its wireless
strategy."

April 23, 2009

Sagging

For
the first time, the USPTO "issued more patents to foreigners than to Americans,"
reports
Business Week. "[T]he slippage comes amid recent reports that show the U.S.
losing its edge when it comes to innovation." South Korea, China, and Japan are
becoming more productive inventors. "All told, American inventors received
92,000 patents in 2008, down 1.8% from the year before and a rise of just 1.4%
over the past decade. Meantime, patients issued to foreigners rose 4.5%, to
93,244, in 2008 and 28.6% since 1998."

April 22, 2009

Buy

According to a recent poll of small and mid-sized computer technology
companies, 64% were interested in buying patents this year, up from a trough of
32% last year. Of those responding with interest in acquisition, 39% reported as
planning to buy, with 25% considering the possibility. The first hurdle is
quality assessment and valuation.

Advanced

Qualcomm announced that it is in "advanced" talks to settle its long-running patent war with Broadcom. Both sides have taken hits and scored wins, but Broadcom has chalked up a better score to date. Qualcomm postponed it Q2 earnings announcement until next Monday. Sounds like it needs some good news to cover some bad news.

April 16, 2009

WaMu

Washington
Mutual (WaMu) is a poster child of the mortgage-lending irrational exuberance
that led to the current economic depression. A run on the bank last September
led to its wrenching government-mandated rescue by JP Morgan Chase. WaMu was the
biggest bank failure in U.S. history, and was sold in a hastily arranged wamu-bam-thank-you-man
auction. WaMu is now suing the FDIC, for selling it off for only $1.9 billion,
claiming it had no such right. Meanwhile, JP Morgan has filed its own suit,
seeking title to disputed WaMu assets, including its tiny portfolio of eight
patents granted and pending, as well as over 300 domestic and international
trademarks, and 1,300 Web domain names. The Delaware district court judge
handling WaMu's bankruptcy case has given WaMu permission to hire a consulting
firm to valuate the bank's IP assets.

April 12, 2009

The Garden of Invention

The
Garden of Invention by Jane S. Smith is a captivating biography of Luther
Burbank, esteemed botanist. But more than a biography, as it chronicles the
science and business of plants during Burbank's lifetime. Admittedly, the book's
appeal relies upon one's interest in the topic. For me, the most fascinating
chapter was the last, that plants were not patentable in Burbank's time. That
last chapter, "The Garden as Intellectual Property," narrates the bramble that
led to the patenting of plants, beginning with the Plant Patent Act of 1930.
Well informed, expertly written and illustrated, for one looking to flower with
knowledge about horticulture, The Garden of Invention is a lovely bloom.

April 11, 2009

Burning the Ships

Marshall
Phelps, Microsoft VP for IP policy and strategy, writes a first-person account
of Microsoft coming to Jesus about patents in the self-serving book
Burning the Ships. It's a corporate mea culpa sleight of hand, a
pseudo-folksy self-absorbed Business Week as People magazine for business people
book. Americans love to read fiction posing as fact about naughty boys coming
clean and making good. What Phelps effects is classic propaganda, by admitting
past mistakes and claiming redemption, though neither accurately so, and never
explaining the meaning of the transformation when Microsoft retains its same old
patterns of behavior. In other words, what Phelps never does is cut the crap.

April 7, 2009

From R&D to Patentee

While big IT whines
to Congress about patents being unfair to them, in the teeth of a
deep recession they are not remiss to keep fueling the fire of genius. From the
Wall Street
Journal:

Wary of emerging from the recession with obsolete products, big U.S.
companies spent nearly as much on research and development in the dismal
last quarter of 2008 as they did a year earlier, even as their revenue fell
7.7%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

March 31, 2009

Stifling

Start-up
Platform Solutions "developed software that turned standard servers into systems
that mimicked I.B.M.'s expensive mainframes." Feeling its profits threatened,
IBM sued Platform for patent infringement. Squeezed, and investors spooked,
Platform was so weakened that IBM snapped up Platform for $150 million, and then
killed its product. That's how the big boys play. Read the full story in the
New York Times.

March 30, 2009

Hammered

Ocean
Tomo patent auctioneer Charlie Ross on its recent event in San Francisco, where
only six patent lots sold of 80 offered, with just eight others getting any
bids: "I haven't talked to myself so much in years."

Quickly Drummed

A
month ago,
Microsoft sued TomTom over GPS navigation patents, and file management,
eight patents in all. Linux-based TomTom countersued with four of its own.
Already they've settled, with TomTom paying an undisclosed sum to Microsoft for
a five-year cross-license.

March 29, 2009

The Invisible Edge

"Innovation without protection is philanthropy." - Mark Blaxill and Ralph
Eckardt in
The Invisible Edge.
What a great book. Calling it "well written" is an understatement. Story after
story that make the point, as well as entertaining to boot. Anyone with an interest
in the business of patents, or the importance of patents, must possess this
book. Crucial reading.

March 16, 2009

Danger!

Intel
warned AMD today that attempting to transfer their patent cross-licensing agreement to
AMD's manufacturing spin-off, GlobalFoundries, was a violation. Intel considers
GlobalFoundries a separate company. AMD owns a 34.2% share of GlobalFoundries,
with 50% voting rights. This dispute, heading now for mediation, follows
unsuccessful negotiation between the two, and should be
viewed against the backdrop that AMD sparked multiple antitrust investigations
of Intel,
which are still ongoing.

Distortion

"Patents
are not ordinary assets; they are options to litigate. While patent lawyers and
other intermediaries benefit directly from the scope and scale of IT patents,
that volume represents potential liability for companies that market useful
products. Most patents belong to others, and the sheer volume obscures the
patent landscape, limits the ability to evaluate patents and inevitably leads to
inadvertent infringement." - lobbyist Ed Black of the Computer and
Communications Industry Association, in the
Silicon Valley Mercury
News.

February 20, 2009

Cartoon Comprehension

Management
consulting firms are inherently oxymoronic, because any manager that needs
consulting from an outside firm is a moron. As in, you run a business, but don't
know how to run your business, so you hire consultants?

What does this have to
do with patents? Well, I agreed to participate in a survey about the patent
business, being conducted by a... you guessed it.

February 9, 2009

Pimped Out

Article One Partners announced today its first "winning" patent study for prior art deemed worthy of invalidating patent 6,784,873, to the benefit of accused infringer Garmin. The prize: $50,000 split two between two "advisors". The art: a 1991 WIPO Publication, and a 1998 out-of-print Windows CE textbook. In addition to obvious beneficiary Garmin, Article One considers this "critical information related to IP disputes involving brands with the global resources of Apple and Samsung". Which raises the question, how much profit did this $50,000 "reward" buy them?

February 4, 2009

Pumped for Action

The
Nanny State of America, 21st century style, buys dross loans as a bailout for
greedy but now bankrupt bankers, ostensibly to stimulate the economy, rather
than cutting taxes, which really stimulates the economy. Now it wants to force
companies to make drugs, when they'd rather be paid off not to. Which
suspiciously sounds like farm subsidies, paying farmers not to plant crops, that
the government has indulged in for decades.

February 2, 2009

Foliation

Former
patent office Commissioner Jon W. Dudas has found a home with
Foley & Lardner.
In apparently unrelated matters, former clients of Foley have filed suit against
the firm. The complaint is that the firm failed to adequate represent their
interests in a patent litigation, and overcharged them for the privilege. This
new suit follows on another pending conflict-of-interest assertion, by Vaxiion
Therapeutics, that charges Foley prosecuted its patents while also assisting its
competitor, EnGeneIC.

January 24, 2009

Fuddy Daddy

Advanced Micro Devices, playing David
to Intel's Goliath, is struggling to stay afloat. AMD is preparing to spin off
its manufacturing operations into a separate company, tentatively called the
Foundry Company. AMD will then focus purely on designing processor chips. This
past week, Intel sent a letter to AMD, requesting a meeting to air out whether
AMD's plan would violate patent cross-licensing agreements between the two. One
agreement was signed in 1976, the other in 2001.

January 21, 2009

Up and Coming

There
is a continuing shift in U.S. patent grants towards Asian companies. While IBM stayed on
top in 2008, at 4186 grants, #2 was Samsung (Korea, 3515), and #3 Canon (Japan,
2114). Of the top twenty patentees in 2008, 13 were foreign-based companies, all
but one Asian. Behind the numbers lie motivations.

January 17, 2009

Patent Strategies

Year
after year, IBM plows ahead filing, and getting, more U.S. patents than anyone:
4,186 gotten last year, the 16th consecutive year leading the patent pack.
Samsung came up to number two in 2008, with 3,515. HP has taken a different tack
the last few years, and fallen behind in the numbers.

January 15, 2009

Bled

Canadian
Nortel Networks, bled dry by bad
management, has thrown in the towel. One analyst characterized Nortel as having
the trifecta for becoming corporate toast: "lack of innovation, a lack of
understanding their customers and a lack of marketing." Nortel, a heavy patent
hitter, has a patent portfolio worth snatching up. This will be just the first
of big patent fire-sales as the world slips into the Second Not-So-Great
Depression.

Cutting Farts

Whining
has become the American way. U.S. car makers, uncompetitive for over 30 years,
fly to Washington in private jets to beg for spare change - just enough to fill
their golden parachutes before bankruptcy. High-tech computer companies spend hundreds of millions to whine at Congress
because of highfalutin inventors wanting to enforce the patent laws. Now a
digital TV lobby has sprouted, CUTFATT, to whine about loafing consumers paying
a patent tax.

January 3, 2009

Shiver

"Abstract
software code is an idea without physical embodiment." So opined the Supreme
Court in
Microsoft v. AT&T, 2007. The high courts in recent years have done what they
could to denigrate software as unpatentable, most recently in a stunningly
incoherent ruling at the CAFC
In re Bilski.
This is the result of both scientific and economic ignorance by the courts, and political
brainwash by computer software corporations in this country, including,
incredibly, Microsoft and Apple. As emergent Asian nations race to overtake the
U.S. in every technological arena, the heavy patent action here is cutting off
our leading-edge nose to spite our face.

December 26, 2008

Mundane

Indubitably
unbiased, InformationWeek's Microsoft blogger, Dave Methvin,
laments small fry with software patents. "It seems like every few months,
some obscure company is awarded a patent for some relatively mundane idea, then
turns around and sues the companies that have been using it... It's a shame that
companies can exploit the patent system to prevent advances in software."

December 18, 2008

Chucked

In
June, Nintendo
sued Nyko for its award-winning Nunchuk video game controller, Nintendo
calling Nyko's version a copycat of its patented design. Wednesday they settled,
in an agreement undisclosed, other than Nyko can sell a redesigned version.

December 17, 2008

Nearly Done Deal

Reflecting
Alcatel-Lucent
circling the wagons, they settled with Microsoft on six patent litigations
dating back to 2002, before Lucent was acquired by Alcatel. One
still-outstanding tab is a $ half-billion trial verdict overhang against
Microsoft on touch-screen technology. Expect that to be wrestled to the ground
soon in another settlement coquettishly termed "mutually beneficial."

December 14, 2008

Falling

Nortel
and Alcatel are exemplary telecom and network companies falling fast in the wake
of the world recession. Nortel is even facing demise. Once fierce in their
patent bite, they are now looking mostly just long in the tooth.

November 24, 2008

Brass in Pocket

RPX
is a patent troll basher that is putting it's money where it's mouth is. RPX, a
self-titled "defensive patent aggregator," is buying patents to keep them from
being asserted against its pals. RPX's initial pals are IBM and Cisco.

November 5, 2008

Embarrassing

Blogger
Rick Frenkel, former Cisco IP honcho, ran a hot little number called Patent
Troll Tracker. Anonymously. The bling was pissing on inventors using shell
companies in asserting their patents, at least one of whom got pissed, namely
Eric M. Albritton, attorney for those being peed upon, in what Rick
richly called the "Banana Republic of East Texas." When Frenkel, like some
hapless gay Marine, was outed, thin-skinned Albritton sued Cisco for "shame,
embarrassment, humiliation, mental pain and anguish," along with a "seriously
injured business reputation." Cisco blew back with a comeback that Albritton
should have seen coming.

October 8, 2008

Fueled

Advanced
Micro Devices (AMD) competes in a CPU duopoly against Intel, holding a 20%
market share short-straw to Intel's 80%. The struggle has been fierce, and now
moves into a new phase. Yesterday, AMD announced a strategy, financially fueled
by Abu Dhabi, that has Intel fuming over patents.

October 7, 2008

Phoning in Junk

Pitiable
pukes who poot about patent trolls are merely mouthing mega-corporate mush. Notwithstanding that patents are a tradable commodity, with any owner having the
same right of enforcement as the original inventor, consider the flip side -
corporations strong-arming their brethren with nothing but trash talk.

October 3, 2008

Flash of Genius

The
movie Flash of Genius, about
intermittent windshield wiper inventor Bob Kearns, is sketchy, edgy, and
uncomfortable. Bob becomes obsessed with righteousness over his invention, e.g.
4,339,698, stolen
by Ford Motor Corporation, and quickly adopted by other auto makers. Bob comes
unglued. Bob refuses to settle only for money, wanting admission by Ford that
they took his invention.

September 30, 2008

Not Biting

"Every
day we're amazed at how victories in court don't necessarily lead to
settlements. We really need the courts to help force these parties into
settlement talks. We're not having as much momentum in signing new business
as we've liked."

September 28, 2008

Life Support

Transmeta,
a creative Silicon Valley chip designer, had a promising future when it started
in 1995. It developed CPUs with low power consumption, perfect for laptops.
Intel infringed its patents, thus undercutting Transmeta's marketing edge.

September 21, 2008

Microsoft's Patent Tax

Microsoft
appears to have mastered the art of
the patent squeeze. A recent
convert from being something other than a patent piñata, since 2003, the
inception of its patent licensing program, Microsoft has wrestled 500
cross-licensing agreements from a wide variety of technology companies.
Invariably the grateful recipient pads the Big Softee's kitty with a pittance
for the privilege of peace of mind, that Microsoft won't hammer it with a patent
infringement suit. Practically all of the licensed, with rare exception, are Microsoft
customers. This past week, Pioneer was the 15th Japanese company to pony up.

September 17, 2008

The Black Bird

Nathan Myhrvold [of Intellectual Ventures] has quietly amassed a trove of
20,000-plus patents and patent applications related to everything from
lasers to computer chips. He now ranks among the world's largest
patent-holders -- and is using that clout to press tech giants to sign some
of the costliest patent-licensing deals ever negotiated.

September 15, 2008

ROI

Beyond
simple counting, number fumbling is a human constant. Wall Street floats on an
ocean of dumb money. And bean counters, the pros that run the banks... Well,
let's just observe that the deepest and longest lasting recessions/depressions
in this country have been lit by what is quaintly referred to as a "bank panic."
We're in the middle of one right now. So, in that spirit of "lost in figures,"
Maureen Farrell at Forbes spotlights "Universities
That Turn Research Into Revenue."

The general right of a firm freely to determine with whom it will and
will not deal was first established by the Supreme Court nearly nine decades
ago. In its 1919 Colgate decision, the Supreme Court observed that
"[i]n the absence of any purpose to create or maintain a monopoly, the
[Sherman Act] does not restrict the long recognized right of [a] trader or
manufacturer engaged in an entirely private business, freely to exercise his
own independent discretion as to parties with whom he will deal." The Court
reaffirmed that principle eighty-five years later in Verizon
Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, where,
citing Colgate, the Court affirmed dismissal of an action alleging
that non-compliance with state and federal regulations mandating the sale of
services to rivals violated section 2. In Trinko, the Court noted
that, "as a general matter," the antitrust laws impose no duty upon a firm
to deal with rivals.

September 9, 2008

Educational Savvy

From a public-interest standpoint, the blessing of blogging has been to demonstrate
how the mainstream press is filled with hacks on assignment. While bloggers live
and breathe their subject matter, "professional"
media do topical cameos, resulting in nicely wrapped provocative stories, at a slanted angle, but with a
garnish from "the other side" for the illusion of a "fair and balanced"
perspective. This week we have Janet Rae-Dupree for the New York Times, wistful
in "When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder:" "In academia's continuing pursuit of
profit, the wonder of simple serendipitous discovery has been left on the curb."

Growing Green

Eco-Patent Commons, a portfolio of environmentally-friendly patents pledged to the public domain, originally announced in January, grew greener yesterday, with the addition of patents from Xerox, DuPont and Bosch, more than doubling the number of enviro-pats now freely available.

September 2, 2008

Fire Eater

Patents
become a public nuisance when worth a pretty penny. Hal Wegner thinks the price
tag of infringement should have flamed the NTP patent reexaminations.
"With a $600 million plus settlement in one litigation coupled with ongoing
litigations against other alleged infringers, BlackBerryGate represents a
billion dollar... patent tax on the public. Yet, the reexamination drags on... and
on... and on." Having granted patents, found valid through the fire of litigation,
the PTO ought to burn the midnight oil to staunch further enforcement. "A
fiasco," Wegner laments.

August 28, 2008

Cheese

Microsoft
and Nikon have consummated a photo finish to a patent cross-licensing agreement,
though the picture is fuzzy. Details went undisclosed, other than indicating
that Microsoft is being compensated by Nikon for its gorilla hug. Since
Microsoft started banging its patent drum at the end of 2003, it has wrestled
over 500 licensing agreements.

August 27, 2008

Pulp Business

In
2002, Immersion sued Microsoft & Sony for patent infringement. In 2003,
Microsoft settled, with Microsoft paying Immersion $26 million. In a secret
codicil, Immersion was to pay a kickback to Microsoft from the proceeds of
successfully suing Sony for the same infringement. Sony
settled
with Immersion in March 2007. Immersion sat pat. So, in June 2007, Microsoft
sued Immersion for reneging on the kickback.

August 17, 2008

Religion

An
anonymous reader at
Slashdot,
the e-gathering place for philosophic technology sophisticates, worries:

I am a developer for a medium-sized private technology company getting
ready for an IPO. My manager woke up one morning and decided to patent some
stuff I did recently. The problem is, I'm strongly opposed to software
patents, believing that they are stifling innovation and dragging the
technology industry down (see all the frivolous lawsuits reported here on
Slashdot!). Now, my concern is: what kind of consequences could I bring on
myself for refusing to support the patent process?

August 6, 2008

Bag Lady, Technologist

In
2006, IBM instituted a "worldwide
policy, built on IBM's long-standing practices of high quality patents,"
disavowing "business methods without technical merit."
7,407,089, granted to IBM, issued yesterday, claims storing customer
preference for paper or plastic bags. So, when you go to the supermarket and
make your bagging selection, feel assured, whichever way you choose, it has
"technical merit."

July 31, 2008

Not Mousing Around

Microsoft
asserting patents is as rare as hens teeth. But Wednesday Microsoft filed a
complaint at the ITC against Primax Electronics of Taiwan, over seven mouse
patents. One portfolio, dubbed "U2," is for connecting a mouse to either a USB
or PS/2 port.
6,460,094 is exemplary. Microsoft claims that over 20 companies have
licensed this portfolio. Belkin had to be slapped over U2, but settled. Another
asserted patent,
7,199,785, is for Microsoft's mouse four-way tilt wheel.

July 25, 2008

Not Untoward

Rambus
got patents covering computer memory standards, set by JEDEC, an industry group.
Defendant chip makers Hynix, Samsung, Nanya and Micron went after Rambus for bad
juju, in the Northern District of California. Defendants lost.

Following a seven-and-a-half week consolidated trial on the jury issues
set forth in the parties' Joint Pretrial Statement filed January 14, 2008,
the jury returned a verdict in favor of Rambus and against the
Manufacturers... Specifically, the jury found that Rambus did not commit
monopolization or attempted monopolization because it did not engage in
anticompetitive conduct... The jury also found that Rambus did not commit
fraud because it made no false misrepresentations and uttered no
half-truths... Finally, the jury found that Rambus did not commit fraud
because JEDEC members did not share a clearly defined expectation that
members would disclose relevant information they had about patent
applications or the intent to file patent applications on technology being
considered for adoption as a JEDEC standard.

July 24, 2008

Inventorship Eruption

In
2004, Magma Design Automation, an
automated chip design company, sent a threatening letter to rival
Synopsys about patent infringement.
Synopsys responded with a declaratory judgment motion that two Magma patents
were conceived while its inventor, now Magma chief scientist Lukas van Ginneken, was employed at Synopsys, hence the patents
were rightfully Synopsys property. In 2005, Van Ginneken signed a declaration that Magma
management knew. Magma stock nosedived 40% in a single day. In the aftermath,
the companies settled, costing Magma $12.5 million. But that didn't end the
story.

July 23, 2008

Sweetness & Light

Courtroom
View Network has stopped licking its chops. The very day its $400 per day
pay-per-view webcast of the Qualcomm-Nokia courtroom prizefight was to commence,
they settle. Worldwide, no complaints now between these two. A 15-year
agreement. Essentially, a comprehensive cross-license. Nokia pitches a few
patents Qualcomm's way, including ones crucial to cell phone standards, so
Qualcomm can muscle others. Nokia pays up-front and on-going royalties, the
figures not disclosed. Both parties were gushingly pleased. Patents have a way
of bringing companies together.

July 21, 2008

Pay Per View

The
Qualcomm - Nokia patent battle is like a heavyweight prize fight. So much so,
the trial, which begins Wednesday, is being televised on pay-per-view for $400 a
day by
Courtroom View Network via webcast.

Qualcomm sells cell phone chips, manufactured under license, but half its
profits are from patent licensing fees. Nokia, provider of 40% of the world's
cell phones, took a license from Qualcomm in 1992, a pact revised in 2001 that
expired in 2007. Nokia, feeling aggrieved at having forked over $1 billion, and
wanting to stanch the bleeding by paying a lower royalty, decided to let itself
be dragged to court rather than pay up.

July 20, 2008

Inventor Scam

After
an 11-year court battle, the FTC has squeezed, in settlement, a $10 million
penalty from Davison for running a con on
patent holders. The FTC claimed the company "enticed consumers with false claims about their
selectivity in choosing products to promote, their track record in turning
inventions into profitable products, and their relationships with manufacturers.
They also deceptively claimed that their income came from sharing royalties with
inventors, rather than from the fees consumers paid."

July 13, 2008

Watchdog

The
FTC, this nation's competition watchdog, is anti-patent. Commissioner
J. Thomas Rosch
considers patents
inherently anti-competitive. But mergers to create an illegal
market-dominant company, well, that's a different topic, a matter of discretion.
So the FTC okayed a merger between Flow and Omax, both Washington state
companies, despite acknowledging that they "are each other's closest competitor
in the highly concentrated U.S. market for water-jet-cutting systems."

July 11, 2008

Chipper

Rambling
Rambus is putting
Nvidia on the litigation
griddle for infringing 17 patents. Nvidia specializes in graphics processing
chips. Rambus specializes in raking it in for patented semiconductor
technologies. Founded in 1990 by two geeks, Rambus has been an nonstop patent
litigator paradise, suing for licenses rather than the pesky process of making
anything. But patient. Rambus jawed with Nvidia over six years before heading to
the courthouse. The two will continue to talk while the lawyers rack up billable
hours.

Home Grown

Vonage,
the erstwhile VoIP patent piñata, now has one of its own:
7,386,111 "Method and apparatus for placing a long distance call based on a
virtual phone number." Also this week, Vonage and Comcast announced a
collaborative agreement to work on network congestion management related to
VoIP.

July 8, 2008

Disappointed

InterDigital
is trying to hammer Samsung into licensing submission for five of its cell phone
patents though the ITC. An ITC staff recommendation, just issued, recommended
against granting injunctive relief. On that news, InterDigital shares shed 22.6%
of their value, dropping $5.72 to $19.54. Investors are a squeamish bunch.

July 5, 2008

Gulp

Up-and-comer
Platform Solutions, a computer mainframe startup backed by venture capital,
including contributions from Intel and Microsoft, is folding its pup tent.
Platform is owner of freshly minted
7,386,670: "Processing of self-modifying code in multi-address-space and
multi-processor systems." After whining to European Union antitrust regulators
about IBM's heavy handedness in the mainframe market, IBM decided upon a
response: swallow the bug.

June 29, 2008

In Patents We Trust

The
Allied Security Trust is an alliance of computer-based technology companies,
aimed at buying patents to avoid having them asserted against them. The entrance
fee is $250,000, plus $5 million in escrow. Verizon, Google, Cisco, and HP are
reputed founding members. The natural recruiting ground comprises members of the
Coalition for Patent Fairness, the lobbying group for raising the cost of patent
enforcement beyond the grasp of grasping inventors.

June 26, 2008

Supplied

i2
Technologies wrestled $83.3 million in a settlement from SAP for supply-chain
software patents. The case was in forced mediation in the Eastern District of
Texas.

In the late 1990s, i2 had been a successful pioneer in the area as a software
vendor, but had its lunch eaten by larger enterprise resource-planning and
workflow software companies like SAP after the dot.com crash at the turn of the
millennium. Inexorable economics of scale crush small companies.

June 21, 2008

Spread Spectrum

Ottawa-based
Wi-LAN, holding spread spectrum patents
5,282,222 and
RE37,802, thinks it has a lock on wireless standards 802.11 and CDMA2000. Wi-LAN
has over 25 companies under the gun, including Apple, Sony, HP, and Intel.
Earlier this week Wi-LAN stuck it to a fellow Canadian company, everybody's favorite
wireless patent piñata, Research in Motion (RIM), as well as Motorola and UTStarcom.

June 18, 2008

Afloat

A
further bit of evidence that Wall Street floats on an ocean of dumb money flowed
in earlier this week. Tessera has an
enforcement campaign for semiconductor packaging patent
6,433,419. The patent, currently under reexamination, is invalid.
Patent Hawk provided the ammunition.
Tessera announced that the reexam, which they expect to go to appeal, will take
so long that the patent will expire before that shooting match is over. Tessara
shares jumped 8.4% on that bit of tripe.

June 17, 2008

Oops

Allied
Signal, owner of
6,287,955, failed to pay its maintenance fee, abandoning the patent.
Changing its mind after the fact, the lament was that the lapse was
unintentional.

In short, when this patent was not deemed to be profitable, a plurality
of employees of the Assignee determined that this patent should be allowed
to expire, and an intentional decision was made that the maintenance fee
should not be submitted to the Office. However, now that it has been learned
that there is commercial interest in this patent, the Assignee seeks to
characterize the intentional decision to allow this patent to expire as
"unintentional."

June 16, 2008

Investing in IP

David
S. Ruder, author of
Strategies for Investing in Intellectual Property, with deep IP
investment experience, ought to know his stuff. But he has written a peculiar
book. His case-based approach is familiar to MBA wanna-be's, and often
enjoyable, but it obscures some big points in the details. It's not clear that
Ruder even knows the definition of intellectual property, and the one thing the
book largely covers in the breach are strategies for investing in IP.

June 12, 2008

Through Its Hat

Linux
purveyor Red Hat found its open source a bit too loose, so it settled two patent
infringement suits with DataTern. One of the suits was brought by FireStar,
which later assigned
6,101,502 to DataTern. DataTern steered '502 and
5,937,402 into the black from Red Hat. Delusional, Red Hat expressed belief
that its settlement will serve as precedent to discourage similar suits. More
likely, Red Hat has painted itself as an easy mark.

June 10, 2008

Wireless Pool

Intel,
Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Sprint Nextel, Samsung, and Clearwire are forming a
patent pool to collectively license WiMAX wireless technology patents. The
alliance plans to collect patents essential to WiMAX and license the pool to
consumer electronics manufacturers. The aim is to advance the widespread
adoption of WiMAX, which has competition from another standard. The patent pool
approach for promoting standards has a successful track record, including MPEG
video compression.

June 8, 2008

Cleaning Up

Filthy
earth monkeys have soiled the planet. Belatedly, checking their virtual diapers,
remorse comes in the form of adopting so-called "clean" technologies. A whole
new area of patent infringement blossoms.

June 4, 2008

Out to Sea

Wall
Street floats on an ocean of dumb money. Patent purveyor Ocean Tomo has
patent-oriented stock indices,
supposedly taking the heavy lifting out of picking patent-heavy stocks.
Speculators, who may be hedge fund or large bank proprietary traders, or market
research fabricators, collar patent lawyers for quick steps up on a steep
learning curve.

Under Pressure

Paris-based
Alcatel SA bought the technology rump of Ma Bell in late 2006 - Lucent
Technologies. The firm has been hyperactive in asserting patents from the
combined portfolio. With good reason. Market capitalization has halved since the
merger. CEO Patricia Russo and Chair Serge Tchuruk are besieged by shareholders
for lack of performance.

May 26, 2008

Spudnik

J.R.
Simplot, French fry innovator, blew his porchlight Sunday, aged 99. Supplier of
dehydrated potatoes to the U.S. military during World War II, post-war, Simplot
pioneered frozen French fries. In 1967, a handshake deal with McDonald's founder
Ray Kroc helped put Simplot on the path to becoming a billionaire. Simplot's
company got 43 U.S. patents, including
D268,539, for peculiar potato shapes.

May 23, 2008

Politically Correct

Each
patent is an invention. Do you think the number of patents says something? Would
knowing the top-patenting companies be a meaningful statistic? Of course not.
Patents are nasty. If you strive to be a member in good standing of the
Coalition of Patent Fairness (CPF),
keep your business clean. Have a bloody steak, hold the veggies. Enjoy fat
cigars, smooth bourbon, and classy hookers. "Patent, sir?" "No thank you Jeeves,
I'm clinging to my guns and religion."

May 20, 2008

Punching the Clock

Taiwanese
memory maker Nanya Technology started a losing patent war against Fujitsu.
Licensing talks over DDR SDRAM chip patents fell apart in 2005. Nanya then sued
Fujitsu in this country's tropical patent hot spot - Guam, for antitrust,
asserting three patents, and a declaratory judgment (DJ) motion over 15 Fujitsu
patents. Fujitsu shot back in Northern California with five patents, and a DJ
for three Nanya patents.

May 17, 2008

Big Cheese

St.
Clair Intellectual Property Consultants thought it had a tiger by the tail - a
tidy patent portfolio for digital camera photo storage. St. Clair started a
shotgun enforcement campaign, including against Kodak. Kodak claimed it had
acquired rights to the patents through agreement with the inventors' former
employers, Mirage Systems. That froze St. Clair's Hail Mary on the digital photo
industry.

May 12, 2008

Multiples

Malcolm
Gladwell in The New Yorker idyllically fuses discovery with invention in his
thematic presentation of a strawman:
"In The Air: Who says big ideas are rare?" The ostensible topic is that
discoveries and inventions are often made contemporaneously by multiple people.
However droll and obvious the observation may be, Gladwell spins his yarn in
posh New Yorker fashion.

May 10, 2008

IP Is Not A Commodity

Earlier this week, Peter J. Wallison argued that conventions in fair value accounting may in part be the cause for the recent bubble markets. Specifically, Wallison pointed to the convention, implemented under FASB 157, that requires assets to be carried at "market" values, even when those assets are not being held for trading purposes.

May 8, 2008

What Adam Smith Taught

Abraham Lincoln's lecture on discoveries and inventions reveals a deep understanding of the patent system. It is amazing how his lecture, which is now well over 150 years old, can seem so fresh today. He and Charlie Munger have inspired me to undertake a historical review of other important lessons of the imminent dead. Today the lesson is from Scottish
enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, famous for his authorship of The Wealth of Nations.

May 2, 2008

Stranded R&D

In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act. Overnight with its passage, universities and government-funded R&D labs gained a comparative advantage in funding R&D. Universities and government labs have a cost advantage in that many had already spent tens of billions of dollars setting up research labs for non-commercial purposes, including teaching and curious exploration. Many scientists and engineers found the prestige of academia, and the increase in professional freedom it promises, a compelling offer. The result has been a gradual shutting down of corporate R&D labs, and an expansion of industry collaboration with scientists and engineers now employed by universities and government labs.

April 30, 2008

Every Patent Affects Two Different Markets

There are two different markets relevant to every valuable patent. First, there is the market for the R&D work that results in the patent. Prices in this market are set by the opportunity costs for the time of scientists and engineers who are capable of theorizing about and experimenting with the technology. Second, there is the market for the claimed products or services that the R&D work opened up. The second market is the one that everyone naturally thinks about. In fact, our whole nation has had a blind spot for the first market for a long time because corporate R&D divisions were serving that market very well until the Bayh-Dole Act was passed in 1980. But most universities have not been able to consistently match pre-product funding with the flow of R&D produced by their faculty. One former R&D employee from Apple and Microsoft blames Silicon Valley, saying "Silicon Valley forgot how to do R&D."

April 26, 2008

International IP Dictionary

Research
and Markets announced an
international intellectual property law dictionary for €266. Covers patents,
copyright, and trademarks, both U.S. and international terms. For patents, has a
"Short History of Patent Law in the
United States," and "Charts on Sources of United States Domestic Patent Law."
Measly web site with little information about the dictionary itself, but, by
comparison, extensive biographies of the authors. In other words, pathetic
marketing, unless you think promulgating cult of personality for relative
unknowns for a dictionary qualifies as good marketing.

April 20, 2008

A New Kind of Patent Boutique?

The state of the legal profession is in flux. The exogenous forces of globalization and technology are straining and breaking the traditional business frameworks for the provision of legal services. How might the future look?

April 18, 2008

Tilt

Peter
Detkin of
Intellectual Ventures, at an
IP Symposium in San Jose this week: "Small inventors, defined as those
entities that have less than 500 employees, are responsible for 60% of US patents,
while the remaining 40% are granted to large companies. On the other hand, large
companies collect over 90% of revenues derived from patents, while small
companies are left with the 'crumbs'."

April 17, 2008

Bank Holdup

Wells
Fargo inked a software license agreement with WMR in December 2003. In 2004,
a patent license agreement (PLA) followed. In early February 2006, WMR sold four
patents to DataTreasury:
5,265,007;
5,583,759;
5,717,868; and
5,930,778, patents encompassing what would become federally-mandated digital
check processing under the law known as Check 21. DataTreasury then embarked on
a massive patent enforcement campaign against a slew of banks, including Wells
Fargo. Wells Fargo thought that DataTreasury was bound by the PLA it had with
WMR.

April 13, 2008

Platinum Patents

Patent
Hawk is delighted to announce
Platinum Patents, the prosecution branch of Patent Hawk. The same folk who
have been wreaking havoc on patents for years for litigation defense,
facilitating monetizing patents for patent holders, and providing patent
intelligence to gain an unfair competitive edge, now offer prosecution services
for inventors. The same excellence our existing clientele experience is now
honed to providing superior patent protection.

April 10, 2008

Checking Out

At
the behest of the big banker boys, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. sponsored an
amendment to the Putrid Patent Act, exempting banks from paying damages for
infringing patents covering the mandated "Check 21" check imaging law. Sessions
has now dropped support for the provision over constitutional legality concerns.
Some things money can't buy, though the banking lobby certainly tried to buy
this.

April 8, 2008

Sold

Patent
auctioneer Ocean Tomo had a roomful of
happy campers at its
April
2nd auction. One portfolio, for processing digital bit streams, sold for
$6.6 million. Four lots sold for over $1 million. 53 of 85 lots offered sold, a
62% success rate. A total of $19.6 million raked in. About 450 people attended
the San Francisco event. Ocean Tomo takes a 25% cut: 15% from sellers, 10% from
buyers.

March 28, 2008

Rogue Blogger

BeavisWeek
has a well written story by Michael Orey,
Busting a Rogue Blogger, about a dross patent blogger who pulled the wool
for a while. "Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler even cited the blog as a good
independent source of information while in Washington lobbying for changes to
patent law that would rein in trolls, unaware he was plugging the work of a
Cisco employee." It's like the Bush administration churning propaganda to the
press about the situation in Iraq before the war, then quoting their published
reports from duped papers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, as
corroborating news. Children playing grown-up games.

Bum Trip

In
an apparent non-sequitur, Avistar
Communications is blaming
Microsoft for its woes
in having to slash its workforce by 25%. Avistar had hoped to license its
patent portfolio to Microsoft. Ever the jester, Microsoft's response was to
hoist a USPTO reexamination petard on all 29 of Avistar's patents. Supposedly,
the PTO will only take up a reexam request given persuasive invalidity evidence.
Avistar mewed it "remains hopeful of reaching a favorable resolution with
Microsoft on licensing Avistar's intellectual property in the near future." For
anyone with an inkling as to what Microsoft thinks of paying a "patent tax,"
that's positively psychedelic.

March 26, 2008

Rambus Rambles

Memory
chip patent holder Rambus saw its stock
soar 39% on news that a San Jose jury dismissed charges from competitors Hynix,
Micron, and Nanya, that Rambus rigged the playing field by getting patents on
the SDRAM memory standard. This is a turnaround from a 2001 jury verdict
validating a fraud charge from Infineon, and a 2006 FTC ruling of deception, now
on appeal.

March 25, 2008

Protecting IP in China

The USPTO is offering a two-day seminar on protecting intellectual property in China. The program is free and will take place April 2-3 in Houston, TX. So, throw your Chi-pod in your Louis Vuitton knock-off and skip down to the Lone Star State.

March 18, 2008

Dish Wishing

Dish
Network, formerly EchoStar, remains in denial, now begging the CAFC for a
reversal of its upholding a $73.9 million jury damages award for infringing
TiVo patents. Dish points to an expert
witness they claim was self-contradictory, thus leaving infringement in doubt.
What's most in doubt is whether Dish will get anything beyond a deaf ear to its
plea.

Nortel Phones It In

Toronto-based
Nortel Networks, known to hammer
competitors with patent litigation suits, spent $560,000 lobbying for patent
legislation in 2007; a Canadian company paying for the U.S. to foul its patent
regime; guess they figure patents are a zero-sum game to them.

March 11, 2008

Did Bayh-Dole end Corporate R&D?

Thirty-years ago, many large corporations had entire in-house divisions devoted to R&D. Think of IBM's Watson and ARC Labs, AT&T Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC. Since that time, these R&D labs have greatly diminished in size or disappeared altogether. At the same time, the pace of innovation in the United States has not been slowed. Assuming that R&D is necessary for innovation, it's very important for us to ask what happened. Where did the R&D go? The Bayh-Dole Act is a prime suspect.

March 10, 2008

They Call This Reportage?

Mareen
Farrell gives a garbled account of the patent scene in Forbes: "They
Call This Intellectual Property?" Farrell surmises the source of pendency:
"Blame part of the pile-up on pesky filers of overly obvious patents." With no
sense of perspective, Farrell mentions KSR, but then rails about silly patents
issued before the PTO made patent grants as scarce as hen's teeth. News for
prosecutors: "To get a patent approved, inventors must establish, among other
things, that their invention or idea is not clearly manifest." Crystal ball in
hand, Farrell on patent reform: "The Senate is expected to vote... in the coming
months." No year for the "coming months" was given.

March 9, 2008

Pooked

Physicists
are realizing that dark energy holds the universe together. It's old feed for
wranglers at the corporate software corral that dark energy keeps the cattle in
the pen. So, Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza last week whining that
Novell striking a patent licensing deal
with Microsoft was like bedding the
dark-side beast sounded less than intriguing; in fact, it sounded just like
whining. In yet another case of childhood reversion, de Icaza wished he stayed
to play in the sandbox of open source.

March 6, 2008

Cock-up

Tessera
stock shot up 16% after it sank in to the motley fools commonly called
"investors" that the non-final rejection in Tessera's patent exam was not
equivalent to falling off a cliff. As Scot Griffin, general counsel for Tessera,
reminded: "Claims of a patent can not be invalidated in reexamination until the
process is fully complete, including all appeals."

March 3, 2008

Visto Victorious

A
week before trial,
Microsoft has settled with Visto
assertion of three Visto data sync patents; terms undisclosed, of course. In
2006, Visto won $7.7 million in damages
against Seven Networks for the same patents. Meanwhile, Canadian chowderhead
Research in Motion (RIM), aiming to pay as much as possible, goes to trial in
July against four Visto patents.

February 29, 2008

Money Changes Everything

MercExchange's
patent assertion against eBay's "Buy It Now" feature resulted in a
Supreme
Court ruling that, using a four-factor test, essentially denied injunctive
relief unless the patent holder was a direct competitor to an infringer.
Thursday, eBay announced that it bought three patents from Merchange for an
undisclosed amount, including
5,845,265, the centerpiece of the matter.

February 24, 2008

No Surprise

Rick Frenkel's setup for blogging always
seemed a bit queer - anonymously
blogging voyeuristically, by supposedly peeking behind the curtain of
non-practicing patent holders quietly enforcing their patents, as if anyone
should care about that ipso facto. That the blog name was
Patent Troll Tracker was a dead
giveaway to the author being a serious case of IP arrested development. That he
did so anonymously was the silly irony: wanting to unmask others while staying masked himself.

February 18, 2008

Frank Piasecki

Igor
Sikorsky flew the first helicopter in 1941. In 1943,
Frank Piasecki flew the
second helicopter, the PV-2, built from junk auto parts in a Philadelphia
garage. The PV-1 never made it past the drawing board.

The first PV-2 flight was rambunctious: Piasecki had only 14 hours flight
experience in a small Piper Cub airplane. The PV-2 was tethered to a clothes
line. The first flight was only supposed to be a couple of feet off the ground.
The helicopter went up, the clothes line snapped, and Frank was winging it.

Patents as Intangible Asset Partitions

Everybody knows that corporations shield shareholders from liability for debts of the corporations. But corporations perform another function, which may be even more important for startups: corporations shield the corporate assets contributed by one shareholder from being raided by the creditors of other shareholders. To see how much this matters, imagine how difficult it would be to form a pool of capital for funding a startup if funding had to be renegotiated everytime one of the startup's investors died or declared bankruptcy. Were corporations not to perform this vital function for shareholders, the costs of negotiating with every potential future creditor of other shareholders would quickly outstrip the benefit of pooling capital in the first place.

In a pathbreaking article, Prof. Paul Heald explains how patents perform a similar transactions-cost-reducing function for intangible asset owners.

February 14, 2008

Shifting Liability

Money
is a lubricant and a salve. Banks apply the salve to others to ease their own
pain: potent wads in political lobbying and campaign contributions. With the
housing market in deep kimchee, the banking industry is pushing proposals to
shift the risk of mangled mortgages to the Federal Housing Administration;
considered far-fetched a few months ago, now more a matter of when than whether.
Then there's this pesky patent holder,
DataTreasury, that practically patented "Check 21," the federal law for
digitally archiving checks.

February 6, 2008

Why Litigate?

Patent
litigation is tremendously expensive. And noisy. The ruckus has stirred quite a
crowd: fat geezers with political heft to match are jostling to shuffle the
seating arrangements in the patent spat ballroom. The stakes for infringers can
stray to six to nine figures or more. Microsoft keeps a small army of patent
litigators marching on the defense of 30 to 40 contemporaneous assertions.
Though not as bad a barrage as Microsoft, quite a few large firms face regular
patent battles. Why not take a more civilized path?

February 4, 2008

Cold War

Linux
godfather Linus Torvalds took potshots at patents in general and software
patents in particular in a
Linux Foundation podcast. Torvolds damns with faint praise Microsoft's
restraint in patent assertion. From the remarks, one may conclude that casting
from a pod makes one grumpy.

Cash Cow Killed

N-Data
bought
5,617,418 and
5,687,174, claiming autonegotiation Ethernet switches. The original owner, National Semiconductor,
had agreed to license the patent for a song if the technology was adopted as a
standard, which it was; now a widely adopted IEEE standard called NWay. Ignoring the supposed license cap, N-Data allegedly
began an extortion campaign. The FTC caught wind of it, and decided to break
wind on it: charging violation of
15 U.S.C. § 45, unfair competition.

January 20, 2008

Trolling

Academics from
NERA, a self-proclaimed economic
consulting hothouse, who spurt that they "understand how markets work,"
demonstrate to the contrary in
a report on
the mythical patent troll, scintillating to a degree that guarantees no loss of
sleep.

Amberwave

Amberwave
is an R&D firm focused on advanced materials development for high technology
applications. Patents are its lifeblood; which is why Amberwave is fighting to
retain semblance of sanity in the patent arena. In our continuing series on
"Heroes of the Patent Wars," an Amberwave snapshot.

Funhouse Mirror

You already know that the best sources of patent news and views are
in the blogosphere. Patents are quintessentially an inside game: proper
perspective incumbent to practitioners, sensationalism set aside in everyday understanding
of patents for
what they really are: intellectual property; nothing more, nothing less. To
outsiders, patents are something else: feared; or coveted, capable of
alchemistic transmutation to gold. It is precisely because the patent game is the
"sport of kings":
an inventor's lottery, and fierce fuel for the economic engine, that patents draw
the media like roaches to candy. The droppings those roaches leave offer no surprise.

January 12, 2008

Pay Wave

PrivaSys
is printing money with
7,195,154, claiming secure contactless credit card transaction processes.
Going a few rounds with MasterCard ended in settlement in August 2006. In March
2007, First Data opened its wallet. Now, Visa, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo
splash out.

January 11, 2008

Free to Cripple

Stinger
Systems, proclaiming itself on its web site as "leaders in electro-stun
technology" (don't ask how a single company can be plural "leaders"; they would
have to hurt you), was delighted to announce that reexamination concussion and
shrapnel eliminated
5,936,183, titled "Non-lethal area denial device", owned by competitor
Taser.

January 4, 2008

Pressing the Flash

SanDisk
owns a portfolio of over 800 patents worldwide related to flash memory.
Persistent persuasion is required. Pressed by assertions in Western Wisconsin court and
the ITC, PNY Technologies has just settled with a cross-licensing agreement.

December 19, 2007

Ritual Fulfillment

Patent
enforcer TPL Group and
Patriot Scientific, holding microprocessor
patents, witnessed
the ritual of bended knee and open wallet by Matsushita/Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC,
and NEC. Trial was docketed for next month in the Eastern District of Texas.

December 11, 2007

Overplay

Qualcomm was the product of the vision and determination of founder Irwin
Jacobs. Jacobs furthered a technology derived from torpedo guidance systems
used during World War II into a global wireless standard. Jacobs also forged a
business model with patents at the core: manufacturing via outsourcing, Qualcomm
became, in essence, a patent licensing company. Facing a relentless squeeze, resentment built among licensees
and competitors, igniting courtroom warfare, with the Big Q lighting the match.

December 8, 2007

Big Iron

IBM
used to be known as a supreme hardball player, even fending off a Justice Department antitrust suit. In present time, its increasing reliance on
services has been an impetus to soften its public image. Its public patent
stance is similar, recently espousing eschewing business method patents, which are
subject to especial derision by the software companies that IBM has for its
client base, as they are generally a threat. IBM terms such patents "soft,"
while continuing pursuit of that ilk deemed most significant. The
anti-patent puttyheads may be fooled by IBM's feints, but make no mistake: IBM
is still a hardball player. This week it filed against Taiwan-based
ASUS, makers of excellent computer equipment,
particularly motherboards, at the ITC, whose only remedy to offer is injunctive
relief.

December 6, 2007

Withdrawal

Over the next few years, the pharmaceutical business will hit a wall.
Some of the top-selling drugs in industry history will become history as
patent protections expire, allowing generics to rush in at much-lower
prices. Generic competition is expected to wipe $67 billion from top
companies' annual U.S. sales between 2007 and 2012 as more than three dozen
drugs lose patent protection. That is roughly half of the companies'
combined 2007 U.S. sales.

December 5, 2007

Patent Plasma Sensibility Spasm

In
but a single example of an endless stream, Samsung and Matsushita, the world's
largest plasma screen manufacturers, suffered a litigation meltdown: settling
their dispute over their respective plasma screen patents. Fortunately for the
companies respective lawyers, the two companies continue to bash
each other over semiconductor and memory patents.

December 2, 2007

Not Rusty

Edward
"Rusty" Rose III stuffed his piggy bank, starting in the 1970s, shorting stocks. In 1989,
Rusty and a rascal named George "Dubya" Bush, along with other investors, bought
a controlling stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team. Oh yeah, Rusty's
bankrolled King George along the way. Rusty kept shorting, acquiring a
whiff of taint by shorting
Terayon Communication Systems, then publicly bad-mouthing the company so as to make
his prophesy bet self-fulfilling. Randy Rusty then decided to try his hand at
the "sport of kings."

November 23, 2007

Qualcomm Skirmishes Update

The
ITC dropped Nokia's complaint against Qualcomm, pending arbitration; warfare
between the two continues in court. In a long-running Broadcom battle, Broadcom
just settled for $19.6 million, after a winning a $39.3 million jury award for
willful infringement,
overturned by the trial judge because the CAFC set the willfulness standard
near the ceiling in
Seagate this past August. Broadcom and Qualcomm continue to duke it out,
with Broadcom so far generally getting the better punches in. Qualcomm is a
patent pusher as well as a sometime patent pinata.

Pop

Burst.com
has three employees. Last year it lost a half million dollars. It could afford
to, because in 2005, Microsoft paid Burst.com $60 million for license to its
streaming media patents. Apple fought, not entirely unsuccessfully, but just
settled for $10 million. Burst.com is now beavering for who to badger next.

November 14, 2007

Another Friend

Microsoft
has inked a broad patent cross-licensing agreement with Kyocera Mita, Japanese
maker of printers, copiers, and Linux-based embedded devices. Since December
2003, when Microsoft finally figured out that licensing patents was a good idea,
it has entered into more than 200 patent cross-licenses, and been sued for
patent infringement at least twice that, doling out billions of dollars in
damages and settlements.

Venturing?

The
Wall Street Journal today posted a
mixed message and a Milquetoast
blog entry on Intellectual
Ventures, itself an ambitious and ambivalent player in the patent game. What
Intellectual Ventures most clearly lacks is the ability to project that it
possesses a sound business model.

November 8, 2007

Bon Vonage

Vonage,
long beset by patent litigation, appears to be clawing its way out of a deep
hole: it settled with AT&T, the last company to hammer Vonage with its patents,
for $39 million. Vonage had previously put behind it, at considerable expense,
suits from Verizon ($120 million) and Sprint Nextel ($80 million).

November 6, 2007

Grape Rape

Varieties of table grapes
may be patented. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) is a cultivator of new varieties, releasing them on a trial
basis to growers, to evaluate growing potential and commercial viability. The
USDA also patents grapes.

The California Table Grape Commission (CTGC), established by the state
legislature in 1967, is funded by a 13¢ per box assessment levied on shippers of table grapes in the state. In the late 1990s, CTGC started licensing table grape patents
from the USDA, and enforcing licenses on state grape growers. From there the story peels.

November 5, 2007

Cash Constellation

Orion
IP is filling its little galaxy with patent lawsuits and subsequent licensing
lucre, sallying forth to grab gobs from up to 100 companies, and that's just for
starters in its enforcement campaign. The two little numbers hooking the crowd:
5,367,627, claiming a computer-assisted sales method for associating parts
to products; while
5,615,342 claims generating a product sales pitch based on a questionnaire.

October 27, 2007

Pick Me Up

SanDisk,
a flash memory maker, saw its shares plummet since publishing its Q3 results
on October 17. What better way to say "I'm a player!" than a rollicking
patent enforcement campaign. So Wednesday, SanDisk unfurled assertions
against 25 companies, with two beefy actions in the new hot rocket docket of
Western Wisconsin, and a large order of fries at the old stalwart ITC.

October 25, 2007

On the Verizon

Verizon
and Vonage settled Verizon's patent assertion. Vonage had been found infringing
two Verizon patents, a ruling upheld last month by the CAFC, with a third
remanded for specific damage reassessment. Vonage has requested an en banc
rehearing. The price tag is $80 or $120 million, depending on the outcome of
CAFC decision; the lower figure if Vonage prevails.

October 24, 2007

Fair Value

One
of the red-meat brethren of corporations clamoring for statutory patent
evisceration, Intel, inked a $250 million dollar agreement with Transmeta,
settling patent infringement charges leveled in 2006.

October 16, 2007

In the Red Hat

Showing
the way for Microsoft to stop shooting off its mouth about Linux getting a
patent free ride and slap down a lawsuit, as if Microsoft needs the money or
their market position is being imperiled; Linux distributors
Red Hat and
Novell are facing the sharp end of the
patent stick; the stick having on its sharp but gooey end moldy Xerox patents
now owned by an Acacia subsidiary:
5,072,412,
5,533,183 and
5,394,521. These patents claimed shared user interface workspaces, but are now
claiming to be able to rake money off the table.

August 17, 2007

Entrepreneurship

The Seattle PI newspaper ran
an
article by Susan Schreter on what it takes for software companies to obtain
venture capital funding, with no mention of patents. A reader asked about the
omission. The turnaround: "Angel investors and venture funds are unapologetic in
their quest to back entrepreneurs who have a "sustainable and unfair advantage"
in the marketplace." With USPTO examination rigor post-KSR, it's even harder to
get a software patent, which makes one even more valuable, as a granted patent is much
less likely to be found obvious than before, and thus more likely to be enforceable.

August 13, 2007

Disgraced

In
the wake of public humiliation for sordid corporate behavior during patent
litigation in a court decision
early last week,
and yet another last Friday, Qualcomm general counsel Lou Lupin resigned today.
The aggressiveness that characterized Qualcomm on the legal front, which Lupin
signified, may now be tempered.

August 1, 2007

Fully Charged

Good
patents carry a charge.
3M sued Sony and
others just this past March for infringing its lithium-ion battery cartridge
patents. 3M shot both barrels: district court and ITC; asking for damages, an
injunction, and attorneys' fees. Sony just settled.

July 17, 2007

Cut Out

Self-taught,
life-long diamond maven Joseph Mardkha got the idea to cut diamonds like colored
gemstones. "While diamonds are typically cut to maximize their brilliance and
sparkle, gemstones such as rubies and emeralds are cut to emphasize their depth
and clarity." Mardkha had his brother-in-law, Yoram Finkelstein, cut diamonds
based on the concepts he had. Mardkha went on to get patents (7,146,827
&
D467,833) and make a small fortune. Finkelstein wanted his cut.

July 1, 2007

Hanging Tough

An ITC injunction looms before
Qualcomm, yet it won't nod to a Broadcom offer of $6 per
cell phone licensing fee for an all-inclusive license to Broadcom patents, or,
reportedly, to a royalty-free "exhaustive" cross-license.

June 23, 2007

Qualcomm Denied

On
Friday, the ITC denied Qualcomm's request to stay its ban on importing Qualcomm
cell phone chips. Qualcomm's only hopes are an unlikely emergency stay from the
appeals court (CAFC) while waiting a presidential veto of the ban.

June 22, 2007

Money Talks - On the Cell Phone

The
June 7 ITC ban on Qualcomm chips, stemming from rival Broadcom's patent
infringement assertion, has drawn fire from CTIA, a wireless industry trade
group.
CTIA wrote a letter to President Bush Wednesday, requesting a veto of the
ITC action, citing the economic damage such a ban would have.

June 11, 2007

A Bug's Life

Dr.
Craig Venter, a pioneer in the effort to sequence the human genome, worked for
years on the daunting task of artificially constructing microbes from selected
genetic material. Venter has now filed for patent protection in the U.S. and
with WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization). Naturally, groups opposed
to genetic engineering are mortified.

June 7, 2007

Patents at Work

Microsoft
and South Korea-based LG Electronics signed a broad cross-licensing agreement.
The agreement allows LG to use Microsoft patented technology in its Linux-based
embedded devices. The deal was announced late Wednesday.

June 4, 2007

Sweet Dreams

After becoming pals with Novell last year, to encourage others to buddy up,
Microsoft bigwigs recently boasted that 235 of its patents were infringed by
open-source products. Now Linux software distributor Xandros has inked a
five-year pact with Big Softie, providing "patent covenants" to Xandros
customers, so they don't have to worry about being sat on by Mr. 235. This is
Microsoft's way of making friends.

May 10, 2007

Litigation Intelligence

Patent
litigation can make or break a company.
VOIP vendor Vonage ate
Verizon's lunch until Verizon pounded back
with a patent lawsuit, putting Vonage's very existence on the line. On the other
side of the coin,
Burst.com snagged $62 million in
a settlement from Microsoft in 2005 for its patented streaming media technology,
and just garnered a favorable Markman ruling against Apple, setting the stage
for a payoff. The arcane ins and outs of courtroom patent battles require a
knowledgeable insider of the game to read the tea leaves early and accurately.
Hedge fund managers, always looking for an edge to lead what will become the
pack, are now hiring patent litigators as scouts, reporting back skirmish
results that could tip the balance, and move stock prices.

April 19, 2007

Microsoft & Samsung Romance Dance

Microsoft
& Samsung Electronics waltzed themselves to a broad cross-licensing agreement. Details
of the dance steps were not disclosed, but involves televisions, computers,
digital video recorders and other digital media recorders. Predictably, both
sides were cooing over the wooing.

April 18, 2007

You Get What You Pay For

The
Software Freedom Law Center asserts that every Microsoft Windows®
user pays $21 in
patent tax, based on rough calculations of patent infringement
damages, settlements, and legal fees Microsoft paid, whereas Linux users pay $0.
So, Windows users, you're paying for the best software Microsoft could make,
regardless of who invented the technology, whereas Linux users don't have to pay
anything, because Linux doesn't have any patented innovation in it,
at least hypothetically; to wit, Linux users pay $0 until Linux is sued
for infringing patents, which it most certainly does. In other words, Linux
users are patent tax evaders. Software freedom indeed.

April 12, 2007

Vonage Roils

In
the wake of getting whumped by Verizon for patent infringement, Vonage CEO
Michael Snyder has walked the plank on the sinking ship. Vonage founder Jeffrey
Citron puts back on his old captain's cap. Vonage
plans to pare itself down to fighting weight in the aftermath.

April 11, 2007

Sweetness & Light

Sucralose,
essentially chlorinated cane sugar, has one-eighth the calories of sugar by
weight, but is 600 times sweeter. Splenda
is the trade name for this wildly popular sugar substitute. Maker and patent
holder Tate & Lyle, having successfully sued for patent infringement before,
are caning three Chinese manufacturers before the ITC, along with 18 importers.

April 9, 2007

DVD Standard

DVD
technology is, needless to say, standardized, and aspects of the technology
patented. Toshiba and eight other companies created the DVD6C Licensing group as
a ready means for DVD player or recorder companies to obtain the necessary
licenses. So far, over 220 companies have signed on. Toshiba has rounded up 17
companies, mostly Hong Kong and China based, that allegedly use the official DVD
logo, but do not have paid-up licenses; the venues: Northern California district
court & the ITC.

April 6, 2007

Hung Up

District
court Judge Claude Hilton slapped a odd order on Vonage today, stopping it from
signing up new customers. Vonage had been found to have
infringed
three Verizon patents. Verizon gave the judge the idea. Besides the
headache, this gives Vonage one more thing to appeal.

Nokia Dials It In

Nokia
and Qualcomm are tussling over patents.
On Thursday, Nokia squeaked that it would pay Qualcomm $20 million for a
quarterly license for Qualcomm patents related to CDMA wireless technology. In
reply, Qualcomm snorted: "They have no right to do that."

April 4, 2007

Blowback Dynamics

The
appeals court
SanDisk ruling regarding declaratory judgment has a least one commenter
consternated.
David Fox of
Fulbright & Jaworski whines in
IP Law 360: "SanDisk is
likely to have a very strong adverse impact on small technology companies and
universities that may not have the means to defend their patents in declaratory
judgment actions. The decision will likely result in the inability of of such
patentees to license patents, especially to large companies. This could have a
profoundly negative effect on the development of technology in the United
States." If there's a kernel of truth in Fox's Chicken Little declaration, it's
good news disguised as bad news.

March 29, 2007

Aced

Acer
Computer has been doing fine: sales are up, and Acer is now ranked fourth in
computer product sales in the U.S. So what does competitor
Hewlett-Packard do? Saddle up the palomino;
ride on down to the Eastern District of Tejas (HP-207-cv-00103-TJW);
draw the pistolero out of its holster, and make Acer dance.

March 23, 2007

Vonage Whacked

Verizon
pressed for an injunction against Vonage, after a jury found three patents
infringed of five asserted. East Virginia district court Judge Claude Hilton indicating he would
consider signing a permanent injunction on the affected technologies was like a toilet
flush on Vonage stock, which dropped 26% today, to $3.

March 22, 2007

Microsoft & Fuji Xerox

Microsoft
announced yesterday evening that it had eloped with Fuji Xerox, inking a broad
patent cross-licensing agreement. From it, Fuji Xerox obtains peace of mind for
its software, some of which includes a Linux base. Microsoft gets to stick Fuji
Xerox technology into Office as it pleases. Terms of the deal were not
disclosed.

March 14, 2007

Green Alert

Aiming to get security screening equipment free, the U.S. Airport Police
State, officially known as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), has
aimlessly wandered into a patent infringement suit, among other charges, between two
competitors, over ads on "divestiture bins" and "composure tables."

March 8, 2007

Hang Up

Losing
business because of lousy service, Goliath Verizon nailed David Vonage for
infringing three patents. The immediate damage to Vonage: $58 million, 70% less
than the $197m sought, and an ongoing 5.5% royalty if Vonage doesn't figure a
workaround. The infringement was found not willful. Verizon is seeking a
permanent injunction. This is but the first patent attack which Vonage must
weather, or wither.

March 5, 2007

Strained Silicon

Amberwave
asserted
5,158,907 against Intel in July 2005 in
the Eastern District of Texas, later adding
7,074,655. Intel rebutted, and various lawsuits arose in a running battle.
Intel continually cried wolf with non-infringement, while Amberwave was a wolf
snarling willful infringement. Now the posturing is history. Amberwave scored a
settlement from hard-nosed Intel, who laid down like a lamb, getting a 10-year
license to Amberwave's patent portfolio in return for undisclosed big green.

March 1, 2007

Patent Enforcement Trends

PricewaterhouseCoopers
released its 2007 survey of patent enforcement. It found less business method
action, more alternative dispute resolutions, and, owing to rising costs, the
first decline in litigation filings in 16 years.

January 17, 2007

Drugged

FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz
has his knickers in a twist,
testifying today before the Senate Judiciary Committee about what he called
anticompetitive patent settlements in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

January 16, 2007

Disjointed Venture

Canon
began SED TV technology research in 1986. In 1999, Canon took a patent license
from Nano-Proprietary for its SED TV technologies. Canon then entered a joint
venture with Toshiba in 2004 to develop this new type of flat-panel display. In
doing so, it seems to have run afoul of its licensing agreement. Nano-Proprietary
sued.

December 11, 2006

Anonymous Dog Eats Homework

The
Medicines Company filed papers today with the SEC blaming its outside legal
counsel for being one day tardy in filing for a patent extension for its
blockbuster anti-blood clotting drug Angiomax. Medicines hoped the Republican
Congress would help them out, but they skipped town. Still, Medicines refuses to
shoot the dog.

December 7, 2006

Getting Carded

Patent-holding
company Card Activation Technologies is continuing its aggressive enforcement
campaign of
6,032,589. After putting the hard word on
McDonalds and
Walgreens in October, the latest to
receive notice from the courthouse is Sears, who also operates
Kmart.

December 4, 2006

Patent Fillip

Ottawa-based
Wi-LAN got a "way-to-go!" on the Toronto Stock Exchange after scoring a patent
coup from Nokia; Wi-LAN's share price jumping 64% on the news, to $4.40
Canadian. Nokia paid $15.2 million for fully paid-up licensing to Wi-LAN's patent
portfolio, while passing off its own portfolio of asymmetric digital subscriber
lines (ADSL) patents to Wi-LAN.

Windows Kisses Linux

Microsoft played a radically different card in its dealing with Linux
Thursday. Novell struck a deal with Microsoft to pay ongoing royalties to 2012
to avoid the risk of having the SUSE Linux ox gored by Microsoft's patent
portfolio, particularly a mutual covenant not to harangue each others customers and developers with patent
assertions; no mention of not suing each other.

November 1, 2006

Forget Cashes Out

Forgent
Networks, who forged filthy lucre from
4,698,672, which covered the JPEG image compression standard, put out a
terse press release today, announcing having settled all outstanding assertions.
Enforcement being an increasingly bumpy ride, claim construction not going its
way, and with a reexam dragon breathing down its neck, Forget declares victory
and goes home.

October 30, 2006

Patent Standard

Historically,
some standards committees have been naive, blind to adopting a
standard incorporating patented technology, with the result that adoptees of the
standard had to fork out patent license fees to a company having kept its mouth
shut until the standard was set and widely adopted. This happened with standards
for images (.gif & .jpeg), DRAM, and wireless communications. Now, at least one
standards setter has set a standard in being patent savvy.

October 24, 2006

Patent Stock Index

The
Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index launches Wednesday on the American Stock Exchange. It is the first major stock index
based solely on corporate IP in the past 35 years. This is yet another chip on
Ocean Tomo's growing pile of patent monetization mechanisms.

October 1, 2006

Polished Look for Dumb Algorithms

For
all the carping about junk patents, there's one patent that's never
controversial: patent leather. The
Seattle Times reminds that, "One of the shining stars of the fall fashion
season is patent leather." This story courtesy of
Google News, whose fancy algorithms aren't
smart enough to distinguish news stories about patents from those on patent
leather.

September 29, 2006

Offshore Patents

Financial
firms advise fiduciary fun, playing house for companies to transfer patent
ownership to offshore shells as a tax dodge. According to the Wall Street
Journal, Merck saved itself $1.5 billion doing that. And other companies have
had their fling with "tax arbitrage." The IRS, never known as the life of the
party, is not amused.

September 28, 2006

Malocclusion Mended

It's
unusual that a plaintiff in a patent infringement suit settles by paying the
defendant. But that's the teeth of the agreement for
Align Technology
settling against OrthoClear for infringing Align's patents for
non-metal dental braces, as well as a mouthful of other business malpractices
which Align accused OrthoClear of.

September 27, 2006

Licensing Muscle

Royal
Philips Electronics, with patents that roped in licensing agreements for
CD-R manufacture from optical storage makers CMC Magnetics, Ritek, Prodisc
Technology, and Lead Data, has been pushing a new per-unit licensing scheme,
called Veeza. The optical disc makers have resisted, fearing a hike in fees. So Phillips
pulled the rug out from under them.

September 25, 2006

Page Count FTC

Last
week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a
report
towards punishing Rambus for its memory patents, which were "unlawfully acquired
monopoly power by deceiving JEDEC;" JEDEC being the committee that embedded
Rambus' patented technology into memory standards, thus granting Rambus its
windfall. The most astonishing facet is the ignorance of the FTC regarding
patent valuation.

September 24, 2006

IEEE 802.20

Given
the landscape, you might think that standards committees "accidentally" adopting
patented technology is, well, somewhat standard. The image compression JPEG
standard has been a cash cow for Forgent Networks, owner of the patent
smothering JPEG. While the DRAM market itself is a cesspool of corporate
corruption, DRAM standards have been a boon to patent-holder Rambus. Now IEEE
belatedly tries to put its wireless communication protocol standard IEEE 802.20
back on the rails after potential surreptitious patent-peddling concerns.

September 14, 2006

Heated Pads

Keith
Whittle & Theo Cummings were Cincinnati chums. Theo, a patent attorney, helped
Keith, gratis, get his patent for body protective pads, with optional heating, used for
sports & construction work. As a result, Keith got
6,588,019. But the patent Keith got wasn't all that he expected, and he
got sore about it.

Patent Happy

Dennis
Crouch &
Peter Zura in the past few days have been kicking around the question: why
so much patenting when so few patents are worth anything? Sophisticated studies
cited by these esteemed bloggers raise paradoxes and postulate justifications,
when, in fact, corporate patenting is both systemic and systematic, as in,
automatic like a dog.

September 10, 2006

Drugged

The
Alza v. Mylan Labs
decision last week, where the patent for
anti-incontinence Ditropan® was knocked off for obviousness, using the
same patent overcame during prosecution, no less, may be a harbinger for other
drug patents skating on thin ice. The Economist this week raises an eyebrow on
drug patents under attack.

August 27, 2006

Blackboard Rattles

The
Washington Post reports today "an angry backlash from the academic computing
community" for Blackboard
asserting its freshly minted
6,988,138 against
Desire2Learn. The worry is, of
course, the broad claims of '138. Not reported is whether the academic computing
community has enrolled for anger management help.

August 22, 2006

Timeline Grinds Microsoft

In
1999, Microsoft took a limited license with Timeline for its patented database
technology. The scope of that agreement has been contentious, the term
"agreement" used loosely, as Timeline & Microsoft have wrangled in court over it
ever since. Now Timeline has terminated the license, accusing Microsoft of
breaching its terms by inducing infringement, and is suing Microsoft for
damages.

August 8, 2006

Big Media Blowout

In
one of the smaller ironies limping around, Big Media went bust, and the creditor
clean-up crew is
trying to scrape some revenue out of selling
6,385,592
and a continuation application; a bit shabby offering in lack of proper
maintenance, but potential exists to rock e-commerce companies that offer
personalized advertising.

August 2, 2006

Sneaky Rambus

Rambus
has been enforcing its memory patents against semiconductor companies,
racking up royalties. The wondrous trick was that the claimed technology was
rolled into the standard for computer memories. Today the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission ruled that Rambus knew just what it was doing, and thus unlawfully
gaining monopolistic rent, as economists put it, for four memory chip
technologies.

July 31, 2006

Non-Profit Patent Profit

The
Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 allowed universities and other non-profit institutions to
retain ownership of patents from federally-funded research. It turned
universities, hospitals, and research institutions into invention hothouses,
and patent monetizers.

July 26, 2006

Anti-Nano Pendency

There
is a surging wave of research in nanotechnology - a catch-all for tiny
structures with broad applicability in other technologies. In other words,
nanotech is a catalytic technology, possibly seminal in this country maintaining
its competitive edge internationally. In that regard, one big problem is the
USPTO.

July 23, 2006

Boston Freedom

What
a difference a settlement makes.
Freedom Wireless
has a patented system for tracking pre-paid wireless phone usage (5,722,067), for which
Boston Communications et al were sued for
infringement. Futilely, to the sound of tiny, inaudible violins, Boston had
cried prior art invalidity, and spat "patent troll" at Freedom. A jury tagged
Boston Communications $128 million for infringement, including
Boston-indemnified co-defendants. Boston appealed, but Friday wisely gave up
that ghost.

July 9, 2006

Another Acacia Sweep

As
of Friday, ace patent holding company
Acacia settled with all six
defendants against which it had asserted
4,937,743, which claims resource scheduling software, specifically oriented
towards health care providers.

June 29, 2006

Intellectual Ventures

June 21, 2006

Infringing Ink

HP
has more than 4,000 patents related to printing supplies, many of those relating
to printer ink delivery. Like razors & razor blades, selling ink is more
profitable than selling the printers that use them. Hence, HP maintains
worldwide monitoring for patent infringement, particularly those related to
refilling ink cartridges by other companies that offer generic ink. HP let it be
known that Walgreens and Office Max are being jawboned.

June 17, 2006

VoIP Wars

VoIP
is a cataclysmic technology for landline telephony.
Vonage is the early market leader, but,
after recently bruising itself with the second-worst IPO in U.S. history, may be
cut down by patent infringement, as freshly rabid Verizon joins Sprint Nextel in
assertion, while other VoIP patent battles rage and loom.

June 5, 2006

Res Judicata

Back in 1995, Dow Chemical sued Pactive for infringing
5,424,016 &
5,585,058,
which went to accelerating release of a blowing agent from a plastic foam.
Pactiv put up something of a fight with invalidity and unenforceability
counterclaims, but backed down and settled, with Pactiv signing a licensing
agreement and paying royalties. In 2002, Pactiv spontaneously ceased payment.

May 24, 2006

Patent Skimming

Mitchell
Medina, an evangelical minister with a taste for offshore patent holding companies,
is funding his Kenya ministry with patent extortion. Medina has 17 U.S. patents,
including one for retrieving dog poop (5,403,050).
How apropos.

May 21, 2006

Foul Play?

Symantec
filed a complaint in Seattle court Friday against Microsoft for infringing
6,826,661, and for stealing trade secrets. Symatec's attorneys observed,
"Over the course of nearly a decade, Microsoft has deliberately and
surreptitiously misappropriated Symantec's valuable data storage technologies."
This is no slight miscommunication, even as the principals ho-hum the affair in
the press.

May 10, 2006

Patent Auction Plus

CNET
News reports that the
April Ocean Tomo auction results improved in after-auction selling. While
only 26 of the 78 patent portfolios went off the block during the auction,
accruing $3 million, five lots in after-auction sales nabbed another $5.4
million. According to Ocean Tomo, that's a transaction rate of nearly 40%; not a
bad batting average.

April 27, 2006

Big 2G Deal

Finnish
cell phone maker Nokia has settled a
long-smoldering dispute with
InterDigital Communications over InterDigital's 2G TDMA patent portfolio,
and it only cost Nokia $253 million to put out the fire.

April 26, 2006

Bankruptcy Auction

Xybernaut,
a maker of wearable computing devices, went bankrupt last July. To help put
itself back on its feet, Xybernaut is
auctioning its "Waypoint" patent portfolio, which includes
6,480,713 &
6,681,107. The Waypoint patents enable location-based services to wireless-enabled mobile
devices, such as plopping ads onto a PDA for nearby restaurants and shops;
potentially useful and annoying.

April 9, 2006

Mary Kay, Sour Puss

Mary
Kay, cosmetics pink lady, has been ordered to to pay TriStrata Technology
$40 million for patent infringement related to skin cream used to treat wrinkles. This is an
interest add-on from a March 2005 $26 million judgment over patented alpha
hydroxy acid technology.

April 7, 2006

Patent Auction Ripple

Ocean
Tomo's first patent auction didn't create the bidding tsunami many sellers
hoped for. Then again, it was an odd bird: a live event for diverse technologies. The scene did attract widespread attention, and drew several
hundred attendees. For publicity value alone it can be considered a success. As
to the patent sales, not so good.

April 3, 2006

Patent Pain

Frank
Hayes of ComputerWorld
likes it when companies pay for patent licenses. "We
like it when vendors wave a big check at a problem and make it go away. Sure,
we'll foot the bill if it means the result is a clean, simple, effortless (for
us) solution." What irks Frank is when they pay, and get nothing for it, except
passing the pain on to consumers.

March 21, 2006

Patent Reader

A free, and most welcome, patent search and retrieval site is up:
Patent Reader. Its .pdf patent
number retrieval is wonderful, as you can get multiple .pdfs in a single throw.
But, for power, Patent Reader's text search won't lose Delphion any customers.

March 1, 2006

Settlement Drive

In
a last-minute fit of rationality, just before trial was to begin, computer disk drive maker
Quantum agreed to pay Sun Microsystems $25 million to settle patent infringement
of two StorageTek patents; Sun bought StorageTek last summer for $4.1 billion.

February 27, 2006

Cash Cow

Posilac
is a cow growth hormone sold by Monsanto, one of those nasty things naturalists
who are smart enough not to drink milk complain about being in milk. But I
digress.
6,692,941 covers that bovine somatotropin. Too bad for Monsanto, having the
product, but not the patent.

February 22, 2006

Spilled Ink

Seiko
Epson has a well-established corporate policy of proactive patent licensing.
That proactivity is again evidenced by suing 24 companies before the U.S.
International Trade Commission (ITC), and in Portland, Oregon district court for
design and utility patent infringement over printer ink cartridges. Up to 30
patents are involved in these actions.

February 17, 2006

Coin Toss

In 2001, Mag-Nif sued Royal Sovereign for
5,902,178 &
6,165,063, claiming devices which sorts coins by denomination into different
tubes through chutes. They settled. But Mag-Nif became unsettled with Royal
Soverign's new "FS-3D" coin sorter. Ultimately, the CAFC had to sort it out (05-1346).

Disconnected RIM

Crackberries thumb away emails on their
Blackberries
while awaiting proceedings beginning February 24 in Virginia district court before a fed-up Judge
Spencer towards an injunction against RIM for infringing
NTP patents; an injunction which would shut down RIM's Blackberry wireless email service
in the U.S. for all but government workers, unless RIM pulls a workaround rabbit out of its hat, which RIM says it has.

February 6, 2006

International Patent Filings Update

The
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) issued
press
release 436 from Geneva on February 3. Yep, it's the one we've all been
waiting for. No weapons of mass destruction, but worthwhile reading if you're
inclined to know the annual summary status of international patent filings.

January 30, 2006

Microsoft Office Update

Last
July, Guatemalan native Carlos Armando Amado nailed Microsoft $8.9 million for
infringing
5,537,590, inter-application linking technology which Microsoft had
incorporated into its ubiquitous Office suite. At the time of the ruling,
Microsoft crooned that "we do not believe today's verdict will have any impact
on our customers." Today, Microsoft is singing a different tune.

January 22, 2006

Bioprospecting Ire

Bioprospecting
is the technological art of refining biological entities, mostly plant-derived,
into patents, and spinning those into a fattened bank account. And it's pissing
off the natives, who for thousands of years knew of these plants, even
cultivated hybrids using classic techniques explained to Westerners by
Gregor
Mendel (the white geezer at right), but knew not how to score wads o' moola out
of them.

January 19, 2006

Bumper Crop

Biotechnology
giants Dow Chemical and
Monsanto have inked a wide-ranging patent
cross-licensing agreement, and withdrawing from their meddling with each
other's patents. The corporate Hatfield-McCoy feud is finally settled;
thar's peace on the farm at last.

January 18, 2006

Genesis of a Hack Job

Received an email from Andrew Brandt,
writer for PC World.
"I'm working on a news story about how the flood of technology patents is
affecting computer users. We're looking to focus on examples of "bad" patents
that adversely affect innovation, raise costs for consumers, or make basic tasks
more difficult or complicated for the average computer user." Oh boy.

January 17, 2006

Xerox's Strategy

Xerox,
a name once so powerful that the company had to fight losing their trademark
because it had become synonymous with the photocopies their machines produced,
became blindsided by market changes, its business crashed, but is now like a
phoenix rising, thanks to patents.

HP Comes Around on Patents

This
week,
the list of top US receivers of patents was released. The list contained the
usual suspects, including HP. It was not too long ago, HP made news saying that
it was hell bent on gaining the top spot on this list. As a result they went on
a patent writing bender. This was at the same time when they were streamlining
their R&D staff and asking them to focus on near term opportunities.

January 10, 2006

Top Drawer

Asian
companies continue to show patenting strength in the U.S., according to figures
just released by the USPTO. While IBM is still top dog, five of the top ten
patenting companies are Japanese, with a Korean sitting in the middle.

January 7, 2006

Patent Statistics Update

Granted
patents & lawsuits are down while application filings rise. Small business and
individual inventors, "the little guy", dominate high technology patenting, but
have a tough road to hoe in profiting from their inventions.

January 2, 2006

Rates Gone Ape

Immodest New-York based Rates Technology Inc. (RTI) is
suing Google for five billion dollars for
its VOIPGoogle Talk, as well as going after other companies,
for infringing telephone billing patents
5,425,085 &
5,519,769. RTI is going to give patent trolls a bad name.

December 29, 2005

Nokia Tab Confirmed

The
US District Court for the Southern District of New York confirmed a June ruling
by the International Court of Arbitration, ordering Nokia to pay $252 million in
patent royalty fees to InterDigital for the years 2002 through 2006.

December 17, 2005

Mr. Walkman

The
NY Times today profiled Andreas Pavel, who invented the Walkman, claimed in
4,412,106 and
5,201,003.
His story of patent enforcement is sad, and may be all too common. Oddly, even
ironically, as Andreas obviously values the publicity given him for patenting, he
says, "I don't want to be reduced to the label of being the inventor of the
Walkman."

December 14, 2005

Visto Licenses NTP Patents

Wireless
email provider Visto signed a licensing agreement with NTP, joining the licensee
ranks of Research in Motion (RIM) rivals Good Technology and Nokia, as RIM's
Blackberry withers on the vine of infringement.

December 13, 2005

King of the Patent Trolls

Acacia
Research is a juggernaut of a patent licensing company, gaining momentum as
the leader in patent monetization for the worthy few. Acacia just announced
acquisition of another portfolio, for monitoring and diagnosing computer
information. The technology is already employed by numerous companies, and has
already been licensed to some large corporations, so the enforcement pump is
primed.

December 12, 2005

Whitespace

Just
finished an assignment from a patent-aware company, looking for whitespace in
the patent landscape of financial services, to get a sense of where new patents
may be generated. How refreshing from the head-in-the-sand, see-no-evil approach
of some companies towards patents.

December 11, 2005

Creative Feeling Infringed

Where
better to throw the dice than Reno?! Yesterday in Reno, Creative Technology
chief executive Sim Wong Hoo, in thinly veiled terms, said that Apple Computer's iPod infringed on
Creative's so-called Zen patent (6,928,433)
and that the company would be aggressively pursuing a patent infringement case.

November 27, 2005

The Power of the Dark Side

Last
week, organizations allied with Linux ballyhooed their bequeathed acquisitions of patents.
Purists against patents railed at the futility and wrong-headedness of this
approach. This commentator was assailed as insane for suggesting that Linux
programmers raise their sights to patenting their inventions.

November 19, 2005

Patent Penguin Exposed

Some
of those who care about open source are decrying the charade of touting patent
protection for Linux via measly cast-off patent pledges from corporations like
IBM. As Florian Mueller, founder of the
NoSoftwarePatents campaign that
successfully opposed a European patent bill earlier this year, ineloquently put it, "those
announcements by the OIN and the OSDL grossly overstate the effectiveness of
those partially ill-conceived approaches. By misleading people they don't put us
any closer to a real solution, but even further away from one."

November 16, 2005

Brain Compression

Something's
amiss. Daniel Ravicher of the Public
Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) today took a
re-examination shotgun
and pointed it Forgent Networks JPEG
patent cash cow:
4,698,672, claiming invalidity in light of other, similar patents generated
by Compression Labs, specifically
5,451,012, and inequitable conduct for not citing those other patents. Two
possibilities: Danny's off base, or attorneys representing more than 80
companies & law firms didn't do their homework.

November 15, 2005

Open Source Fig Leaf

In
a gesture to generate warm and fuzzy feelings that Linux has a pretense of
intellectual property protection, the "global consortium"
Open Source Development Labs has opened its
Patent Commons. The Patent Commons
is a set of searchable databases listing the "more than 500 patents pledged to
date".

November 14, 2005

The Patented Internet

Causing
quite a stir, e-commerce pioneer Amazon has recently scooped three patents, two
for consumer reviews (6,963,848;
6,963,850), and one for categorizing query results (6,963,867).
That's just a tiny tip of the reality iceberg that the Internet is heavily
patented.

Linux Patent Momentum

Tarmac is being laid for a new Linux patent runway: IBM, Sony and Philips
have joined forces with Linux distributors Red Hat and Novell to create Open
Invention Network (OIN), a company for sharing Linux patents, royalty-free. This
could be a harbinger of a huge shift in the software business, as the press is
playing it up, or it could just
be this year's software buzz.

November 3, 2005

Coffee Beer

Nestec,
a subsidiary of Swiss-based Nestlé, has filed patents (WIPO
application) in every major market worldwide for "coffee beer". Nestec's
non-alcoholic coffee beer smells like strong coffee, has a caffeine kick like a
mule, and foams like beer when poured.

November 1, 2005

R&D leading to IP Strategy at Corning

As reported by MIT Technology Review, over the last four years Corning focused a significant percentage of its R&D on a new way of cleaning up Diesel exhaust. While dirty, this is does not appear to be a sexy business. Regardless, it does provide an interesting example of a firm willing to dump the status quo, give up a lucrative market, invest heavily, and establish a proprietary position through IP in a growing market.

October 31, 2005

Birdbrained Flu Scare

October 30, 2005

Google Patent News

Google
has a customizable news page at their Beta
news site. You can add a custom
section using a keyword. Add the word 'patent' as a news section keyword, and
you get a good channel of patent news, better than the
Moreover RSS
feed for patent news.

October 29, 2005

RIM Bleeding

Research in Motion (RIM) has lost traction: increasing competition,
declining stock price, bad publicity, with two of the first three aspects owing
to patent infringement that comes with an increasing hefty price tag.

October 24, 2005

IBM's Patent Leverage

"IBM
is pledging royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development
and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards
built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats." There's
stifling fine print to that, but the public relations song and business model
backing it are solid.

October 23, 2005

Economist Survey of Patents

The Economist, for my money the best
news magazine in the world, has a survey this week of Patents & Technology. For
anyone interested in an informed perspective on the subject, calling it
"essential reading" would be understatement.

October 18, 2005

No Freedom For Wireless

A federal judge in Boston granted an injunction Monday against Boston
Communications Group Inc. (BCGI) for infringing patents owned by Freedom
Wireless. In the ambiguous understatement of the year department, E.Y. Snowden,
chief executive of BCGI, proclaimed ''Our fight is far from over."

October 15, 2005

Gene Patents

U.S. and European patent laws preclude patenting genes in humans. But
proprietary techniques for isolating genes or developing gene-based therapies
have been patented for decades. A new study from MIT, published in Science on
Friday, found at least 18.5% percent of the known human genes had patents
attached to them, and that figure is probably an underestimate.

October 14, 2005

Pandemic Patent

Mike Levitt, U.S. Health Secretary: "The world is a biological dangerous
place right now. An enemy avian virus known as H5N1 is establishing a presence
in nations all over the world." The best known antiviral medicine for H5N1 is Tamiflu, and it's patented.

October 3, 2005

Patent Liquidity

Turning nominally illiquid assets into liquid assets is only accomplished
through market makers. This is fundamentally how the stock market works. And
it's how the patent market is increasingly working.

September 15, 2005

Prepaid Grief

The Wall Street Journal has a picturesque story of the patent business in
action, under the understatedly quaint heading: "Aggressive
Patent Litigants Pose Growing Threat to Big Business". In making that
headline statement, one can only surmise that the Wall Street Journal hasn't
been paying attention to the patent game for the past 200 years or so.

September 11, 2005

Silicon Valley Patents

According to Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network,
ten percent of all U.S. patents awarded in 2003 went to individuals or companies
in Silicon Valley, up from four percent in 1993. Other valleys take note.

September 6, 2005

The Anti-Patent

George Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, today blew chunks, spewing that the upcoming version of the General Public License (GPL), which covers free software distribution, may include a clause targeting companies that assert a patent against a free software product.

August 31, 2005

Much Ado About iPod

The press has been having a field day with patents granted to Microsoft and
Creative Technology that may apply to Apple Computer's runaway success, the iPod
portable music player. Creative Technology has even been putting out
its own
tosh about how iPod copied Creative's patented user interface.

August 16, 2005

Non-disclosure agreements

Non-disclosure agreements, typically used early in a potential business relationship to preserve valuable IP, are an excellent tool to explicitly define which party maintains any blossoming patent applications and patented inventions.

August 2, 2005

Squealing

AnimalConcerns.org is squealing about a Monsanto patent application (WO
2005/015989) which claims "methods for producing improved swine genetics."
AnimalConcerns oinked: "Monsanto Corporation is out to own the world's food
supply, the dangers of genetic engineering and reduced biodiversity
notwithstanding, as they pig-headedly set about hog-tying farmers with their
monopoly plans. We've discovered chilling new evidence of this in recent patents
that seek to establish ownership rights over pigs and their offspring."

July 7, 2005

Printing Money

DataTreasury has a license to
print money, in the form of two patents:
5,910,988 and
6,032,137. "Check 21" is a federal law, effective October 2004, which
requires that paper checks become replaceable by digital versions. Essentially,
DataTreasury patented the law.

June 7, 2005

Not Gaga for the search engine that begins with G (G*)

Late last year G* announced a huge project to scan every book in the world. Well that is not what they said exactly, but pretty close. Although the initial press release stated that they will begin with out of copyright books, in an interview with Search Engine Watch, G* also stated that "In-copyright" books that are in these collections will have basic bibliographic information available.

May 23, 2005

IP Foresight Is Missing

Maybe it is just me, but I have grown a little weary of firms complaining about competitive pressures as a reason that their margins are receding. While indeed market pressure are likely the cause of current woes, I think that the real reason for their slow downward spiral is a lack of IP foresight. Their margins are being eroded because they have not competitive advantage. Often firms think they can use their talent to stay one step ahead of the competition. This may very well be the case in some industries; however at some point you will start dealing with incremental improvements. If you have not spent the diligence to protect your early advancements, your firm will be in a features and price war when you were initially the market leader.

May 11, 2005

Jump Start Your R&D Through Licensing

IP is commonly regarded as the key currency of the new economy. Lester Thorow has stated, “Intellectual Property lies at the center of the modern company's economic success or failure.” In addition, Gartner research has noted that value of intangibles is increasing to nearly 90% of the entire value of global 2000 firms. The reason is simple - these assets provide the firm with its sustainable competitive advantage. IP includes trademarks, copyright, and less tangible forms, but patents remain a key component. First and foremost they provide a firm with a legal, protectable monopoly in the material covered by patent.

BeavisWeek

When their fabled MTV show wound down, Beavis and Butthead had to find a new gig. While Butthead tanked into suds, Beavis, ever the ambitious one, started a magazine: BeavisWeek. Circulation behaved like, well, Butthead: it tanked. So Beavis hired a marketing goon, who advised a brand name change - "title it like it's serious, and you can put whatever crap you like inside. They read the crap, thinking it's respectable because of the title." And so BusinessWeek was born.

May 2, 2005

Patent Economics: Part 6 - The Importance of Patents

Before the 1500's, an average human's prospect for prosperity was stagnant. Beginning around 1820, the pulse of economic development quickened, with the Industrial Revolution in England coming into full stride. What changed?

April 29, 2005

Paying for Patents on 3G Phones

The British market research firm Informa announced on Thursday that patent royalties on 3G mobile devices could significantly impact the wireless industry and, in particular, hurt smaller device vendors (those without patents).

April 24, 2005

Patent Economics: Part 5 - Theories

There are several different interrelated theories about patents. Some consider a patent as a natural right, to be able to own and profit from one's invention. In securing a property right, a patent solves the inventor's dilemma, providing a commercial platform for promoting technological innovation, even though some see patents as an obstacle to innovation. Certainly a patent is a business tool, as it offers potential for profit through licensing, and the prospect of a defensive shield against patent assertion by others (countersuit).

April 17, 2005

Patent Economics: Part 4 - Incentives

There are at least four incentives that justify a system of granting patents.
These incentives are: (1) an incentive to invent; (2) an incentive to disclose;
(3) an incentive to commercialize, and (4) an incentive to workaround. The core
argument in justifying a patent system is that these incentives would be
lessened or lacking without patents.

April 15, 2005

Patent Economics: Part 3 - The Inventor's Dilemma

Given that substitution inherently limits the monopoly power of patents (as
explained in part 2 of this series), here we consider how patents provide
economic benefit to a patent owner and society. Consider the counterfactual case
of invention in a society that does not offer a patent grant. An inventor
without access to patent protection faces the inventor's dilemma.

April 8, 2005

Patent Economics: Part 2 - Substitution

A monopoly can only be sustained if there is no substitute for a good. For example, for a consumer wanting to rid its household of mice, in a competitive market, mouse traps are cheaper than keeping a cat. But a monopolistic mouse trap maker could charge only up to the point where it was cheaper to have a cat, or whatever else works as a substitute for a mouse trap. So, a monopolist's exclusionary power only extends as far as the limited availability of substitutes for the good over which the monopolist has control. The more substitutes that are available, the more competitive a market becomes. Substitution is a key aspect in considering patents as a monopoly.

April 7, 2005

Play It Again, TiVo

TiVo, which makes digital video
recorders (DVR), announced that it has acquired six U.S. patents from IBM. TiVo
said that the acquired patents cover audience measurement, integrating Internet
access with TV, automatic recording scheduling, content screening, searching,
and program guide enhancements.

April 6, 2005

Patent Economics: Part 1 - Market Monopoly

This begins a series on the economics of patents. This first installment
explains the economics of market monopoly, to be contrasted with patent
economics in succeeding installments.

A patent is widely considered a monopoly, and though it smacks of truth, the reality is not so simple. Monopolies are generally
ill-favored, as, at least in theory, they raise prices above what would
naturally occur in a competitive market. Anti-patent ravers
stake their rationale against patents as representing monopoly power that unduly
costs society. A further contention, espoused most fervently nowadays by
anti-software patent advocates, is that patents have the perverse effect of retarding
innovation, rather than actually encouraging it. With some grounding in economics, specifically market monopoly, and an understanding of the
economic nature of patents, one sees the "evil patent monopoly" viewpoint as
gross overstatement.

March 28, 2005

Online Profiling and Privacy

Amazon.com has been taking flak in the
press (MSNBC,
Yahoo) from "privacy advocates" for its online personalization patents. "They are constantly finding new ways to exploit personal information,"
woofed Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center. Chris seems a wee pissed about it, but admits to having
bigger fish to fry.

March 26, 2005

The Patent Tax

Intermec Technologies and Symbol Technologies Inc. are embroiled in a patent suit/countersuit cook-out. Corporate caterwauls invariably justify themselves in a marketing spin for sympathy, and attempt to pacify understandably skittish stakeholders. In the background, Elvis Costello sings, "you never see the lies that you believe."

March 19, 2005

Priming the Pump - Preparing for a Contingency Patent Case

Not many companies will be awoken by a phone call from a patent licensing company, offering a million dollars at a wink for a few patents, as one of my clients was. But some companies could use a wake-up call to monetizing their patents.

Ironically, given that a patent is a monopoly of usage denial, the value of a patent is in its adoption by others. To a patent holder, infringement should be sweet music. The problem is paying the tab for hiring a band to play that tune.

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"A court must ask whether the improvement is more than the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions. The analysis need not seek out precise teachings directed to the specific subject matter of the challenged claim, for a court can take account of the inferences and creative steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ." - SCOTUS in KSR, 2007 -

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thought on the unthinking." - John Maynard Keynes -

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